ProPublica

by Eli Hager

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

It is one of the enduring myths of the U.S. child support system: that payments made by fathers actually make it to their families. And yet, every year, hundreds of millions of dollars in child support is instead intercepted by federal and state governments — as reimbursement for the mother having received welfare at some point.

But that may be changing. Since a 2021 ProPublica investigation found that child support payments totaling $1.7 billion annually were taken from families and redirected into state coffers, at least six states have rewritten their laws and policies to allow the money to flow directly to kids.

New Mexico, where we focused our reporting, made such a change shortly after our story was published. From Wyoming to Illinois, Michigan to Vermont to California, more child support is now going to children. And several other states are considering similar reforms during their upcoming legislative sessions.

This July, Illinois will start “passing through” all child support paid by fathers to their families, instead of pocketing it as repayment for welfare. “The intent of this change is for more families to receive more support,” said Jamie Munks, spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services. A state’s child support system should not be funded by withholding child support from the lowest-income families being served, she said.

“Not passing through money to a family who is already experiencing financial difficulties will likely exacerbate those difficulties and may make them more reliant on government assistance,” Munks added.

Nicole Darracq, assistant director at the California Department of Child Support Services, said that under a new state law her agency has roughly doubled the amount of child support that it is passing through to families currently receiving welfare. There was roughly a $44 million net increase in payments to families from 2019 to 2022, she said.

Darracq added that starting this week, another piece of new state legislation will allow child support that fathers pay to mothers who’ve previously received welfare to go to those moms and their kids, instead of being intercepted. This change will send an additional $160 million to families each year, she said.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures’ most recent analysis of state laws, at least 26 states and Washington, D.C., pass through some or all child support payments made by fathers to their families that have received welfare, also known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In the other states, the government takes the cash.

The practice of confiscating child support from poor families persists in part because some conservative policymakers believe that welfare provided to single mothers should be considered a loan from taxpayers, to later be repaid by the patriarch of the family.

“Legislators suggest to me that if a family gets both [welfare] and child support, they’re ‘double-dipping,’” Jim Fleming, past president of both the National Council of Child Support Directors and the National Child Support Enforcement Association, told ProPublica in 2021. “That argument is still out there,” he said, although it is “becoming more and more of a minority view.”

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by Gerardo del Valle

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

The Pabón family is among the nearly 8 million Venezuelans who have left their country in the last decade, fleeing an authoritarian regime and a collapsed economy — one of the largest population displacements in the world.

The family arrived in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico — across the border from El Paso, Texas — on Dec. 1, 2022, following a six-month journey across seven countries and thousands of miles. They’d left their homeland at a time when the United States had agreed to suspend the deportations of Venezuelans who were already living in the country because Washington had broken diplomatic relations with that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. Thousands of new Venezuelan migrants arrived in Mexican border cities like Juárez hoping to take advantage of the opening.

But by the time the Pabóns arrived, the U.S. had reversed course and subjected Venezuelans to many of the same immigration restrictions as people of other nationalities. They were required to use a special app, called CBP One, to make an appointment to enter the U.S. to seek asylum. In El Paso, there were about 150 appointments available a day. Suddenly, the Pabóns found themselves stranded with countless other tired and frustrated migrants in a city of 1.5 million residents that lacked the resources to provide for the staggering number of new arrivals.

The Border and the Election

Join us May 29 to discuss why immigration is a top issue for voters and the U.S. policies that gave rise to the deadly Juárez fire.

The pressure-cooker situation culminated in a fire on March 27, 2023, inside the city’s only immigration detention center. It killed 40 immigrants and injured more than two dozen others in one of the deadliest incidents involving immigrants in the country’s history.

Five months later, the Pabón family managed to get an appointment via the CBP One app and cross into the U.S. They eventually applied for asylum, but after joining a migrant population ever more numerous and visible and without family roots or acquaintances in the country, a clear path for them remains elusive.

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

by Robert Faturechi, Ellis Simani and Justin Elliott

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The IRS has launched a campaign to examine whether wealthy taxpayers are violating the law when using their ownership of sports teams to save large amounts in taxes.

The effort will focus on sports industry entities that are reporting “significant tax losses” to “determine if the income and deductions driving the losses” are lawful, according to the IRS announcement earlier this year. That announcement, which consisted of one sentence on a webpage devoted to compliance campaigns by the IRS division that focuses on large businesses, did not specify what kinds of abuses the agency will be looking for.

The initiative comes after ProPublica, drawing on leaked IRS data, revealed how billionaire team owners frequently report incomes for their teams that are vastly lower than their real-world earnings.

When someone buys a business, they’re often able to deduct almost the entire sale price against their income during the ensuing years. That allows them to pay less in taxes. The underlying logic is that the purchase price was composed of assets — buildings, equipment, patents and more — that degrade over time and should be counted as expenses. Owners of sports franchises routinely avail themselves of such deductions, which can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But in few industries is that tax treatment more detached from economic reality than in professional sports. Teams’ most valuable assets, such as TV deals and player contracts, are virtually guaranteed to regenerate because sports franchises are essentially monopolies. There’s little risk that players will stop playing for their teams or that TV stations will stop airing their games. But the team owners still get to deduct the value of those assets over time, sometimes billions of dollars’ worth, from their taxable income.

It helps billionaire sports team owners pay far lower income tax rates than the athletes they employ or even the low-wage workers who sell food or clean their stadiums.

ProPublica’s 2021 article traced how owners, starting with the late baseball showman Bill Veeck decades ago, persuaded the IRS to accept a “gimmick” that allows owners to take massive depreciation write-offs.

Among those benefiting was Steve Ballmer, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers and former CEO of Microsoft. His tax records showed that in recent years his basketball team had reported $700 million in losses for tax purposes, despite indications that the Clippers’ real-world financial results were often profitable.

That allowed Ballmer to legally not pay tax on any real-world Clippers profits, and to offset his other income and cut his tax bill. His spokesperson said at the time that Ballmer “has always paid the taxes he owes.”

The practice helps create a counterintuitive overall tax picture that upends conventional wisdom about how taxation works in America. ProPublica found that billionaire owners like Ballmer are consistently paying lower income tax rates than their millionaire players — and often lower even than the rates paid by the concessions workers who staff their stadiums.

The IRS did not immediately respond to questions from ProPublica about what prompted the initiative and what abuses it’s investigating.

In an analysis for clients, the law firm Morgan Lewis credited the IRS campaign to several factors: an increased enforcement budget, criticism that wealthy taxpayers are not audited frequently enough and ProPublica’s reporting.

“The IRS may be acting on its promise to restore ‘fairness’ in tax compliance by taking more shots at partnerships and high-wealth individuals, including sports team owners,” the firm wrote. “With the Sports Industry Losses campaign, the sports industry looks to be the next opponent in the IRS arena.”

Clay Hodges, a tax planning specialist at the firm Moss Adams, said in an interview that the IRS usually selects areas to focus enforcement efforts based on evidence that it will find unpaid taxes. While it’s impossible to judge the IRS’ motivation based on its public announcement, he said, he noted the regular headlines of sports team owners selling teams for huge profits.

“When they announce these campaigns, the IRS is very strategic,” he said. “It’s more than just a fishing expedition. They think it will bear fruit.”

by Sharon Lerner

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The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a proposal this week to ban a controversial pesticide that is widely used on celery, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables.

The EPA released its plan on Tuesday, nearly a week after a ProPublica investigation revealed the agency had laid out a justification for increasing the amount of acephate allowed on food by removing limits meant to protect children’s developing brains.

In calling for an end to all uses of the pesticide on food, the agency cited evidence that acephate harms workers who apply the chemical as well as the general public and young children, who may be exposed to the pesticide through contaminated drinking water.

Acephate, which was banned by the European Union more than 20 years ago, belongs to a class of chemicals called organophosphates. U.S. farmers have used these pesticides for decades because they efficiently kill aphids, fire ants and other pests. But what makes organophosphate pesticides good bug killers — their ability to interfere with signals sent between nerve cells — also makes them dangerous to people. Studies have linked acephate to reductions in IQ and verbal comprehension and autism with intellectual disability.

Environmental advocates, who have been pushing the agency to restrict and ban acephate for years, said they were not expecting the agency to make such a bold move.

“I’m surprised and very pleased,” said Patti Goldman, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, who has been part of a farmworker led group that expressed concerns to EPA officials over the past years about the ongoing use of acephate and other organophosphates.

As much as 12 million pounds of acephate were used on soybeans, Brussels sprouts and other crops in 2019, according to the most recent estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey. The federal agency estimates that up to 30% of celery, 35% of lettuce and 20% of cauliflower and peppers were grown with acephate.

A draft risk assessment issued in August by the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs found “little to no evidence” that acephate and a chemical created when it breaks down in the body harm the developing brain. The document said there was no justification to keep restrictions on the bug killer that are designed to protect children from developmental harm. Removing that layer of protection would allow 10 times more acephate on food than is acceptable under the current limits.

The draft risk assessment’s conclusion relied in large part on the results of a new battery of tests that are performed on disembodied cells rather than whole lab animals.

The tests have been in development for years, but the EPA’s review of acephate’s effects on the developing brain marked one of the first times the agency had recommended changing a legal safety threshold largely based on their results.

Multiple science groups, including panels the EPA created to help guide its work, had discouraged using the nonanimal tests to conclude a chemical is safe. A member of the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, one of the panels providing guidance to EPA, described the earlier acephate proposal as “exactly what we recommended against.”

But even as it proposed a new outcome this week, the EPA did not change its stance on the use of the cell-based tests.

“Even in this good news proposal, the EPA continues to misuse the cell-based assays,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the environmental advocacy organization Natural Resources Defense Council.

Sass said she believes that both pressure from advocates and questions from journalists helped the EPA decide to change course on acephate. ProPublica began submitting a series of detailed inquiries to the agency about the pesticide starting in January.

An EPA spokesperson said late Tuesday that the agency had been working for months on its proposal to ban acephate from food and that neither advocates nor journalists played a role in the decision.

The EPA proposal would ban acephate on all plants with the exception of trees that do not produce fruit or nuts.

While lauding the proposed ban, Nathan Donley, a scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, expressed concern about the possibility that, after pesticide companies and agricultural groups respond to the proposal, the agency might not finalize its proposed ban. (The agency is accepting public comments through its portal until July 1.)

“The pushback on this is going to be really intense,” Donley said. “I hope they stick to their guns.”

by Aliyya Swaby

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

After a federal appeals court ruled this week that transgender people are legally entitled to the same access to medically necessary health care as everyone else, the immediate reaction of the states of North Carolina and West Virginia was to vow to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The immediate reaction of Hann Henson, an employee of a North Carolina school district who’d spent years struggling to access gender-affirming care, was to break into tears. Last year, ProPublica wrote about his tumultuous journey seeking medical support in his gender transition while living in a state with a long history of discrimination against transgender people.

“Having something that you know is going to help you feel better, is going to help you feel whole, and having it constantly dangled above your head is just dehumanizing,” he said.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Virginia, ruled that the two states violated federal law by banning coverage of certain treatments for transgender people but allowing it for others. These cases were the first of their kind to reach a federal appeals court and the decision could influence states and courts in other parts of the country.

For years, transgender people have argued in court that the North Carolina state employee health plan and West Virginia Medicaid program discriminated against them by refusing to cover certain treatments when they are prescribed for transgender people. The court’s majority agreed with this argument, in line with previous district court rulings, highlighting that West Virginia’s Medicaid program “covers mastectomies to treat cancer, but not to treat gender dysphoria.”

Henson found out about the lawsuit in 2022 soon after he started his job as a communications specialist for a North Carolina school district. He realized he was sprinting against a clock, with the state under a court order to cover gender-affirming care while the legal fight was underway. He scheduled what he hoped would be his last major surgery for November 2023, two months after the appeals court heard oral arguments on the case.

But as he got closer to the date, he realized he had to delay the surgery due to a stomach ulcer. He said the looming court decision was all he could think about for months. He even considered trying to go ahead with the procedure despite his poor health. He finally got the surgery in late March.

Dale Folwell, the state treasurer and a named defendant, used the lawsuit in his campaign for governor. (He lost the Republican primary in March.) He maintained in interviews and court documents that the state health plan should have the authority to determine which employee benefits are covered. He reiterated those comments in a statement this week: “Untethered to the reality of the Plan’s fiscal situation, the majority opinion opens the way for any dissatisfied individual to override the Plan’s reasoned and responsible decisions and drive the Plan towards collapse.”

Hann Henson and his wife, Aly Young, in Asheville, North Carolina, last summer (Annie Flanagan, special to ProPublica)

Henson will need a follow-up surgery in five months, a common part of the process. He said he now feels a sense of relief knowing the appeals court decision ensures that he likely won’t lose access to his care at a critical time. But he worries about other transgender people seeking services and imagines them refreshing a court website compulsively just like he did.

For now, the ruling protects access to gender-affirming care for transgender people on both states’ health plans. The decision would apply to any federal court cases brought in other states in the 4th Circuit: South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland. The 11th Circuit is currently considering two similar cases out of Georgia and Florida.

All the active judges on the court heard oral arguments in the case in September. In their ruling Monday, eight of the 14, almost all of whom were appointed by Democratic presidents, ruled in favor of the transgender plaintiffs. “In addition to discriminating on the basis of gender identity, the exclusions discriminate on the basis of sex,” wrote Judge Roger Gregory, who was initially appointed by President Bill Clinton and confirmed under the George W. Bush administration.

The states argued that gender-affirming care cost too much and was medically ineffective, so they were justified in not covering it. The court’s majority opinion dismissed both arguments as lacking support. Evidence shows covering the care would likely cost states very little, and major medical associations support broad access to gender-affirming care, citing evidence that prohibiting it can harm transgender people’s mental and physical health.

The judges who signed the three dissenting opinions were all appointed by Republican presidents. “In the majority’s haste to champion plaintiffs’ cause, today’s result oversteps the bounds of the law,” Judge Julius Richardson, a President Donald Trump appointee, wrote in the principal dissent. “The majority asserts that the challenged exclusions use medical diagnosis as a proxy for transgender persons, despite the complete lack of evidence for this claim.”

North Carolina and West Virginia are planning to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to press releases from each state. “We are confident in the merits of our case: that this is a flawed decision and states have wide discretion to determine what procedures their programs can cover based on cost and other concerns,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a statement.

It remains to be seen how and whether other states and insurance companies with restrictive policies for covering gender-affirming care will act in response to the opinion.

“It should serve as a cautionary tale not just to states that implement state health plans and Medicaid programs but also to private insurers,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan with Lambda Legal, which represented the transgender plaintiffs in North Carolina and West Virginia. “I would hope that this serves as a determining factor in the adoption of any bad policies as an inspiration to get rid of policies that currently exist.”

by Perla Trevizo

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Stefan Arango, a 31-year-old Venezuelan husband and father, felt immediately nauseated by the smells of sweat, urine and feces when Mexican guards ordered him into the cinder block cell in the border city of Ciudad Juárez. The tile floor was strewn with trash, and several men inside lay on flimsy mats that were incongruously covered in rainbow-colored vinyl. The windows were so small that they didn’t allow in much light or air. And, perhaps mercifully, they were so high that the men couldn’t see they were just a short stroll from El Paso, Texas, the destination they had risked everything to reach.

It was March 27, 2023, and Arango had been detained by Mexican authorities who had agreed to help the United States slow the record numbers of migrants crossing the border. A guard allowed Arango to make a one-minute call to his younger sister, who’d come to Juárez with him and whom he’d left waiting at a budget hotel nearby. She sobbed, worried that he was going to be deported back to Venezuela.

“Don’t cry, everything will be fine,” he assured her. “Whatever happens, don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back.”

He couldn’t tell exactly how many men were inside the temporary detention center, maybe more than 100, but new detainees were being brought in while others were being taken away. Those milling around him were grumbling. They said they hadn’t been given water for hours. They hadn’t been given enough food. No one was giving them answers. Why were they being held? What was Mexico going to do with them?

At about 9:20 that night, some of the men began banging on the metal bars that ran along the front wall of the cell, demanding to be released. One of them reached up and yanked down a surveillance camera; another climbed the door and pulled down a second camera. Others started to pile the sleeping mats against the bars until they blocked the guard’s view.

At least one of them flicked a lighter. Within minutes, the cell was engulfed in flames and smoke. Arango pleaded with a guard: “Brother, don’t leave us here.” But the guard turned his back, saying, “Good luck, dude,” as he fled.

Surveillance camera video taken from inside the detention center at the time of the fire shows the flames and smoke spreading through the cell as the guards scramble to open a side door before leaving the detainees trapped inside. (Obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Arango rushed to a bathroom, now filled with dozens of others, all screaming for help. He turned the shower on to wet his hoodie, thinking it would protect him from the heat. Then the lights went out. Everything stung — his eyes, his nose, his skin. He sat himself down and whispered a prayer. The detainees’ cries stopped, and he could hear the sounds of bodies hitting the floor.

When he opened his eyes, he was wrapped in a mylar blanket, lying in the parking lot amid rows of bodies. Arango pulled the cover off his face, gasped for air and raised his hand, hoping to be seen. He heard a woman’s voice shout, “Someone lives among the dead!”

Forty men were killed and more than two dozen were injured in one of the deadliest incidents involving immigrants in Mexico’s history. Investigators put the blame for the incident on the migrants who set the blaze and the guards who failed to help them. The United States urged immigrants to take heed of the tragedy and pursue legal methods for entering the U.S., without acknowledging that some of those caught in the fire were attempting to do just that when they were detained. However, an examination by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune underscores that it was the foreseen and foreseeable result of landmark shifts in U.S. border policies over the last decade, by which the Trump and Biden administrations put the bulk of the responsibility for detaining and deterring staggering numbers of immigrants from around the world onto a Mexican government that’s had trouble keeping its own people safe.

The bodies in the Juárez parking lot were not only evidence of the tragic consequences of U.S. policies, but they were also graphic representations of the violence and economic upheaval raging across the Americas. The dead had traveled there from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and, like Arango, Venezuela. Over the past decade, growing numbers of people from these countries have traversed Mexico and crossed the U.S. border to file claims for asylum that take years to resolve and allow them to live and work in the United States during that time.

When first running for president, Donald Trump used the scale of the arrivals to jolt American politics, vowing to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. As president, he effectively turned Mexico into a wall, pressuring that country’s president to take unprecedented steps that required nearly everyone applying for asylum to wait there as their cases went through U.S. immigration courts. And citing the pandemic, he ordered border officials to quickly return immigrants to Mexico or to their home countries under a little-known section of the public health code — Title 42 — that allows the government to limit the numbers of people allowed into the country in an emergency.

Democrats denounced the measures as inhumane, and early in his presidency, Joe Biden moved to loosen those policies, only to keep versions of some when the rising numbers of migrants coming into the United States started to cause political repercussions for him and his party.

The Border and the Election Join us May 29 to discuss why immigration is a top issue for voters and the U.S. policies that gave rise to the deadly Juárez fire.

The result was chaos on both sides of the border, although as numerous experts had predicted, the worst of it unfolded in Mexico. Squalid tent encampments sprouted in Mexican border cities that didn’t have sufficient shelters and other resources. Frustrations among migrants fueled protests that blocked major roads and bridges. Mexican officials cracked down harder by rounding up immigrants and packing them into already overcrowded detention centers.

A Biden administration official would not comment on the role U.S. policies played in the fire, except to say that it had taken place in a facility that “was not under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government.” A White House spokesperson expressed condolences to the families of those who died — but also didn’t answer questions about the policies that contributed to the incident and are still in place. Instead, he pointed to the ways that Biden had expanded legal pathways for immigration, calling it the largest such effort in decades.

U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, was among many legislators who’d warned Washington, and specifically Biden, that such a tragedy was inevitable. “The whole system in Mexico is partly a creation in response to initiatives that the United States began,” he said in an interview. “That’s why we should care, because we bear some responsibility.”

How We Got Here

Immigrants, many from Venezuela, sleep by the entrance of an international bridge that separates Ciudad Juárez from El Paso, Texas, as local residents walk by. Some of them were waiting in the border city while trying to get an appointment to enter the U.S. using the government app CBP One. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

The dangers of outsourcing immigration enforcement to Mexico were clear to experts and political leaders on both sides of the border long before the Juárez detention center erupted in flames.

“Mexico is simply not safe for Central American asylum seekers,” wrote the union that represents the U.S. government’s asylum officers as part of a lawsuit against Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program in 2019. “Despite professing a commitment to protecting the rights of people seeking asylum, the Mexican government has proven unable to provide this protection.”

Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission reported that year that migrants were being held in filthy, overcrowded detention centers, at times without sufficient food and water. Those conditions, the commission said, were spurring immigrants to protest, including by setting fires. Prior to the fatal Juárez fire, at least 13 such incidents had occurred at detention facilities across the country, including at the one in Juárez. The earlier incident there occurred in the summer of 2019 and was started in a similar manner, when disgruntled migrants set their sleeping mats on fire. About 60 detainees escaped unharmed.

The Trump administration rejected the warnings, saying that the system was clogged with meritless claims and that turning away people who didn’t qualify for protection made it easier to address the needs of those who did. The Trump campaign didn’t respond to questions about the impact of the former president’s policies, except to say it did a better job than Biden of keeping migrants safe by removing the incentives for them to make the journey to the border. In a statement, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that under a second Trump term, the message would be, “DO NOT COME. You will not be allowed to stay, and you will be promptly deported.”

Asylum is a thornier issue for Biden because of divisions within his own party, with some advocating for a more generous system and others worried that the existing backlog makes the system virtually impossible to fix. As a result, his presidency has been marked by moves aimed at placating both sides.

On his first day in office, Biden suspended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy — officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols — which he’d said had “slammed the door shut in the face of families fleeing persecution and violence” and created humanitarian suffering in Mexico. And he began rolling back the Title 42 COVID-19 restrictions by exempting unaccompanied minors from the ban. All at once, a border that had nearly been shut to asylum seekers had a new opening at a time when historic numbers of immigrants were on the move globally. Among them were nearly eight million Venezuelans, fleeing an authoritarian government and a collapsed economy, in one of the largest displacements in the world.

The Pabón family is among the nearly 8 million Venezuelans who have fled their country over the last decade, constituting one of the largest population displacements in the world. This short documentary follows the family from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, to their first months in the United States, where they’ve asked for asylum and struggle to build new lives. (Gerardo del Valle/ProPublica)

Within weeks, the numbers of people attempting to cross the southern border reached levels that hadn’t been seen in decades. Biden reached out to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for help. After denouncing the conditions that migrant families had been forced to endure in Mexico, the Biden administration began pressuring that government to take them back. “We’re trying to work out now with Mexico their willingness to take more of those families back,” Biden said at a news conference, adding later, “I think we’re going to see that change. They should all be going back.”

On March 19, 2021, his administration announced the U.S. would send 2.5 million COVID-19 vaccines to Mexico. That same day, López Obrador declared that he’d close Mexico’s southern border to nonessential traffic, citing the pandemic.

Immigrants continued to come nonetheless. By the end of Biden’s first year in office, the Border Patrol reported that encounters with immigrants had soared to 1.7 million, compared with 859,000 in 2019. The numbers rose further, to 2.2 million, in 2022, the year that Biden announced plans to lift Title 42 entirely. Republican governors in 24 states immediately filed suit against the administration to stop the move. And one of those governors, Greg Abbott, began sending busloads of people who’d crossed the border into Texas to cities controlled by Democrats, including New York, Chicago and Denver.

Biden, faced with a political crisis on top of a humanitarian one, responded with an array of measures. While fighting to overturn Title 42 in court, his administration expanded its reach to allow U.S. officials to immediately expel to Mexico Venezuelan, Haitian, Cuban and Nicaraguan migrants. He required asylum seekers to use an app, CBP One, to make appointments for entry to the United States and authorized border officials to turn back those who hadn’t done so. He also barred some people from seeking refuge in the U.S. if they didn’t first apply for asylum in a country they passed through en route.

President Joe Biden speaks with Border Patrol agents in El Paso, Texas, on Jan. 8, 2023. The visit followed an announcement by the administration to expand the use of Title 42 to include Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

In a nod to immigrant advocates, he paired that move with a program that allowed about 30,000 people from the countries that were newly affected by Title 42 to apply for temporary humanitarian visas from home, as long as they passed a background check and had a financial sponsor in the U.S. He also opened centers in some Latin American countries from which migrants could apply to come legally. But none of it seemed to have a lasting effect on making his party happy, deterring new migrants from arriving at the border or keeping them safe.

In January 2023, two months before the fire, nearly 80 Democrats in Congress, including Grijalva, wrote Biden a letter to say that they remained concerned.

“As the administration well knows, current conditions in Mexico — the primary transit country — cannot ensure safety for the families seeking refuge in the United States,” the letter read. “We urge the Biden Administration to engage quickly and meaningfully with members of Congress to find ways to adequately address migration to our southern border that do not include violating asylum law and our international obligations.”

Days before the fire, the Congressional Research Service echoed that warning, saying that the buildup of immigrants in Mexico had “strained Mexican government resources and placed migrants at risk of harm.”

Maureen Meyer, a vice president at the Washington Office on Latin America, said, “There’s an enormous human cost to prioritizing enforcement over human wellbeing and safety. The fire is probably one of the most egregious examples of what could happen.”

Strips of paper bearing the names of the 40 men killed in the fire are tied with marigolds to the fence surrounding the immigration detention center where they died. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) A City on Edge

Arango had fled his country a decade ago because, he said, supporters of the country’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro had threatened him for campaigning on behalf of the opposition. He also found it impossible to make a living for himself and his two children on the roughly $40 he earned monthly as a soccer player and coach in Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city. He initially moved to Colombia but left there after struggling to find gainful employment and moved again to Bolivia, where he met a woman whom he married.

In early 2023, Arango was still playing soccer, and there were signs his wife might be pregnant. He’d been hearing upbeat stories from Venezuelan friends who had migrated to the United States and were settling into new jobs. Because the United States had broken relations with the Maduro government, Venezuelans did not have to clear the same immigration hurdles as other nationals. They were largely shielded from deportation and had not been subjected to Title 42.

Arango’s sister, Stefany, had a boyfriend who’d made it across the border and gotten a construction job in Austin. Arango believed he could do the same.

Stefan Arango, who survived the fatal fire, is among nearly eight million Venezuelans who have fled an authoritarian government and a collapsed economy in the past decade. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

In about 36 grueling days — across hundreds of miles of inhospitable terrain — Arango and Stefany, 25, arrived in Juárez in mid-March 2023, riding on top of a cargo train. They found themselves in the middle of a city on edge. Juárez, with 1.5 million residents, had long been more of a way station for immigrants headed to the United States than a final destination. But the U.S. gateway that had been open to Venezuelans was now shut. They were subject to the same asylum restrictions as Central Americans. They couldn’t cross the border without an appointment, and there were only about 80 appointments available each day through El Paso.

Juárez’s shelters and hotels were filled beyond capacity, and thousands of migrants set up camps under bridges and along the banks of the Rio Grande. They crowded busy intersections and shopping districts, begging for food, money and work. Many complained that they had been robbed by Mexican criminal organizations and harassed by the police and immigration agents. The longer they stayed, the more frustrated they and the city struggling to accommodate them became.

The day Arango and his sister arrived, hundreds of migrants blocked one of the bridges that connected Juárez with El Paso and pleaded with U.S. officials to be let in. The United States deployed officers in riot gear and raised a curtain of concertina wire to keep them out, while Mexico used the national guard to disperse them on the other side. Juárez Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuéllar seemed to sum up his city’s sentiment the next day. “The truth is that our patience is running low,” he said. “We’ve reached a tipping point.”

Migrants wait in Ciudad Juárez alongside a barbed-wire fence that separates the city from El Paso, Texas. Frustrated with the low numbers of people who can get appointments through the CBP One app, some of those stranded in border cities decide not to wait and instead turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

The city went on heightened alert and began putting more immigrants in detention. During the first three months of 2023, officials in Juárez conducted at least 110 sweeps around the city — almost as many as they had done in the entire previous year. On the day of the fire, Arango had left his sister at the hotel to look for work and buy food. He was with a handful of other immigrants walking near the border fence when they were picked up by Mexican immigration agents and taken to the city’s only immigration detention facility.

Built in 1995, the facility sits on the banks of the Rio Grande, which forms the border between Mexico and the United States. The detention center was divided into two cells about 100 feet from each other. One was completely bare and was meant to hold no more than 80 men, while the other had bunk beds and could hold up to 25 women. Two former detainees said the men’s cell had four toilets and as many showers.

Alis Santos López, a 42-year-old Honduran, had been held in the facility for two days by the time Arango arrived — and according to Mexican law, which called for him to be released after 36 hours, he shouldn’t have been. Unlike Arango, he wasn’t hoping to start a new life in the United States. He was trying to get back to the life he’d already established. Santos had worked for 10 years as a roofer in New Jersey but was deported at the end of 2022 back to his native Honduras.

The economic hardships and violence that had pushed him to abandon his country before seemed to have worsened. The municipality where his family lived, Catacamas, was among the most violent in Honduras. When he and his wife discovered men lurking around their house one night, he thought they’d targeted him because he’d come home with money that he’d earned in the United States.

Within weeks, he’d set out again for New Jersey, this time with his wife, Delmis Jiménez; three children; daughter-in-law; and grandson in tow. The group said they had been robbed and extorted throughout the journey and had run out of money in southern Mexico. Santos went on without them, promising that he’d send for them. But Juárez officials at the local bus station intercepted him shortly after he arrived.

Alex Santos Jiménez, 20, from Honduras, shows a photo of his father, Alis Santos López, who was detained by Mexican immigration officials at the bus station in Ciudad Juárez and taken to the immigration detention center two days before the deadly fire. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Rodolfo Collazo, then 52, was one of two federal immigration agents and three private security guards on duty at the facility on the night of the fire. Trained as a computer engineer, he was still relatively new to the job and had taken it because he couldn’t find anything better in his field. It paid under $10,000 a year, but Collazo was able to cobble together enough to make ends meet by working a second job with a ride sharing company.

Records from Mexican prosecutors’ investigation into the fire, court testimony and interviews, including with officials who worked at the detention facility, indicate that it was woefully ill equipped to hold immigrants for long periods. Not only were there insufficient accommodations for the detainees to eat and sleep, the cell lacked basic safety equipment like working fire extinguishers and smoke detectors and had no emergency exits. Scuffles and hunger strikes among detainees were not uncommon.

About 6 feet tall, with salt-and-pepper hair, Collazo was sometimes torn between his sympathy with the immigrants’ plight and the responsibilities of his job. They’d sometimes complain that they’d run out of basic supplies like soap and shampoo, and he’d go out and buy them when he had a little extra money. On the night of the fire, he noticed that the detainees seemed more agitated than normal, and he tried to make small talk to calm them. But he was summoned away from the facility to transport a couple of Salvadoran children — brothers ages 10 and 14 — to a different facility for minors.

When he returned about half an hour later, thick black smoke was already billowing out of the building. The guards were scrambling outside and told him they couldn’t find the keys to the men’s cell. Collazo ran into the building but felt his eyes sting and his lungs fill with smoke. “I’ve never felt anything like it,” he said. “It was horrible.” Barely able to see or breathe, he turned back around. (In a surveillance camera video taken from inside the detention center at the time of the fire, which was made public as part of an investigation by La Verdad, El Paso Matters and Lighthouse Reports, an agent is heard saying that she had told the detainees she was not going to open the cell.)

Firefighters descended on the scene and managed to fight through the flames, break into the holding cell and attempt to rescue those inside. Paramedics rushed to care for those who were unconscious. The dead, including Santos, were laid together in four neat rows on the cold asphalt outside the building.

A Mexican soldier saw one of the bodies move. It was Arango.

Uncertain Future

To mark the first anniversary of the fire, there was a march in downtown El Paso. Across the border in Juárez, residents hung mylar blankets on the fence surrounding the detention facility to honor each of the immigrants who died there and celebrated a special Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe Cathedral. “It’s a tremendous tragedy,” El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz said, citing the loss of “40 young, aspiring lives.” But the greater tragedy, he said, would be to “forget the persons and families that continue to suffer.”

The names of the migrants killed in the 2023 fire, including Alis Santos López, are written on mylar blankets on the fence surrounding the detention center that burned to mark the one-year anniversary of the incident. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

By then, the Mexican government had closed the Juárez facility and temporarily suspended operations at 33 others across the country. The head of Mexico’s National Migration Institute, which enforces the country’s immigration laws, was charged criminally with failure to perform his duties, although he remains free and on the job. The institute didn’t respond to requests for comment. Agency officials have previously defended their treatment of immigrants in their custody.

The “Remain in Mexico” policy and Title 42 have been lifted, but Mexico still stands as a critical arm of U.S. immigration enforcement. With poll after poll showing that Americans consider securing the border a priority as the country prepares for this year’s presidential elections, the Biden administration continues to require asylum seekers to use an app to gain entry to the United States. It’s also fighting in court to be allowed to bar some people from seeking asylum if they hadn’t asked for refuge in countries they passed through en route to the United States. That rule is significant because nearly every asylum applicant has crossed through another country — especially Mexico — before reaching the U.S.

Stephanie Leutert, an immigration expert and former Biden administration official, said she’s not surprised that the fire hasn’t forced the administration to reverse course. “If migrant deaths would lead to policy change, we would have changed policies a long time ago," she said.

Seitz, who advocates for immigrants, lamented the same thing. “I wonder how many deaths it’s going to take,” he said in an interview. “Will there be a time when our country wakes up? What will it take for us to recognize that we need to head on a different course?”

Meanwhile, the repercussions of those policies continue to play out in the lives of those affected by the fire.

At a federal prison about 10 miles from where he once worked, Collazo is now the one behind bars, along with two Venezuelan immigrants and several of his former co-workers. He’s awaiting trial for involuntary manslaughter and causing injury to 67 men for his role in the fire. He says he is not guilty. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison. His wife, María Trujillo, and children have sold their cars and borrowed money to pay his legal fees, which so far exceed $50,000. Trujillo, 53, has begun cleaning houses and selling tamales. Meanwhile, his daughter, Tania Collazo, 35, works extra shifts at a local hospital as a medical assistant. She even traveled to Mexico City last year to appeal for help from López Obrador.

Because they have so little faith in the system, they often do some of the investigating themselves by speaking to other former officials and detainees who might have information that could help Rodolfo Collazo’s case.

“Every day I fall asleep and wake up with the agony of what if the system fails again,” Tania Collazo said. “He’s never getting out.”

First image: Mexican immigration agent Rodolfo Collazo’s wife, María Trujillo, left, and his daughter Tania Collazo say they try to stay positive, but the longer he’s behind bars, the harder it is to remain hopeful. Second image: A photo of Rodolfo Collazo sits atop a table at their home in Ciudad Juárez. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Arango spent about three weeks in an induced coma in a hospital in Mexico City after a respiratory arrest. He’d suffered carbon monoxide poisoning and severe damage to his lungs, kidneys and throat. During his monthslong recovery, his moods were as erratic as a ride on a roller coaster — giddy one moment to be alive, distraught to the point of trying to put his fist through a wall when the doctor laid out the complicated medical challenges that stood in the way of his recovery while his wife struggled back in Bolivia on her own. A devastating low point for both of them came when she miscarried their baby, a boy, while Arango was hospitalized.

In September of last year, the Biden administration allowed Arango and his wife, along with others who survived the fire, to enter the United States for humanitarian reasons. The couple traveled by bus to Austin. His sister had already made it there. When Arango, tall and slim, saw her, he smiled and wrapped her in a long, tight hug.

While he said he is thankful to be alive, there are still times he falls into a deep depression. “I’m still working on finding myself again,” he said. “I ask God for time to get back to the Stefan I was before. A better Stefan.”

Arango looks back to Mexico one last time before he crosses into the United States. Arango, along with his wife and others who survived the fire, were granted permission to enter the United States for humanitarian reasons. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) First image: Arango places his hands on a Bible he traveled with through seven countries and the Darién Gap, a stretch of jungle between Panama and Colombia. As the smoke and flames spread through the cell inside the detention center, Arango said, he fell to the floor and prayed. Second image: Arango and his wife, Patricia Moyano, from Bolivia, send voice messages to friends while waiting inside the Greyhound bus terminal in El Paso before traveling to Austin. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Jiménez didn’t know her husband had died in the fire until three days after, on her birthday. Santos’ body was sent back to Honduras. His family had returned from southern Mexico to receive it and bury him near their home in Catacamas. Jiménez picked a silver-colored coffin and wore a T-shirt with, “You will always live in my heart,” emblazoned on the front.

“All this suffering,” she thought during the ceremony. “For what?”

His death, however, didn’t deter her and her family from leaving Honduras again. She knew there was a chance that they might meet the same fate trying to get to the United States, but she said she felt even less safe staying in Honduras. So the family set out again, riding buses and walking along railroad tracks, trying to get an appointment through the CBP One app, not understanding they had to be in northern or central Mexico in order to use it. Their feet blistered and their bodies covered with bug bites, they slept in abandoned buildings or on the porches of people who took pity on their plight.

A Mexican nonprofit sent them money for bus tickets to Mexico City, where they continued trying their luck on CBP One. Eventually, after a month, they got an appointment, for last November, the day before Thanksgiving. And they were off to Juárez.

Jiménez, her long black hair tied back in a ponytail, stood atop the dividing line between Juárez and El Paso with her children and grandson. Her small frame tipped back under the weight of her backpack stuffed with clothes and some of her most precious possessions: their wedding rings, a silver watch Santos gave her for Mother’s Day and a framed picture of him. As she walked into the United States, she couldn’t get over how close he’d come.

“It was really just steps for him to fulfill his dreams.”

Delmis Jiménez stands on top of the international bridge that divides Ciudad Juárez and El Paso as her family waits for U.S. customs officers to allow them into the United States. Her husband died attempting to reach the U.S. eight months earlier. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

Dan Keemahill contributed data reporting.

by Anna Clark

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The Food and Drug Administration issued a rule on Monday that brings new scrutiny to a vast array of critical lab tests, including some popular prenatal genetic screenings, that reach patients without any federal agency checking to ensure they work the way their makers claim.

“This is a significant step forward,” said Peter Lurie, president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a former FDA associate commissioner. These tests have “always been one of the remaining gaping holes in the FDA regulatory structure. And it’s great to see that the agency has taken concrete steps to close it.”

The new rule cites coverage of the issues with lab-developed tests by multiple media outlets and researchers, including ProPublica articles: one that revealed problems with prenatal genetic screenings, popularly known as NIPTs or NIPS and the other on faulty lab-testing for COVID-19 overseen by one company.

The move comes after decades of debate and stalled legislation on LDTs, which also include certain cancer screenings as well as some tests for rare diseases. Because these tests are designed, manufactured and used in a single lab, they escape most federal oversight over marketing and accuracy.

A large coalition of labs, associations and academic medical centers have long pushed back on the prospect of increased FDA involvement in these tests. It would be too onerous, they’ve argued, and it jeopardizes patient access to health services.

One of nearly 7,000 comments submitted in response to the draft rule came from the Association for Molecular Pathology, representing a wide-ranging group of professionals associated with laboratory testing. The FDA’s proposed changes “would result in laboratory professionals being treated as product manufacturers instead of board-certified healthcare providers,” the association’s president wrote, and it would “unequivocally hinder and harm patient care.”

The agency’s hands-off approach dates back to an era when these tests were a relatively small, low-risk sector of the health care system. Now, they are a much bigger player and include high-stakes tests made by commercial companies. While the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reviews lab operations, it doesn’t check whether the tests themselves are clinically valid. The tests aren’t registered with the federal government, so nobody knows how many exist. In 2021, Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that 12,000 labs are likely to deploy them, many of which process thousands a day.

The ProPublica story on prenatal genetic screenings referenced by the FDA revealed how the agency didn’t check the tests before they reached patients or evaluate marketing claims made by the companies that sell them. Companies aren’t required to publicly report when a test gets it wrong, the investigation found, and no federal agency can recall faulty screenings. The story detailed how false positives, false negatives and indeterminate results can have painful consequences for expecting parents. (We also published a guide to the prenatal tests to help families with their questions.)

Our coronavirus investigation showed how a Chicago-based company with state and local contracts in Nevada sold testing services that were unreliable from the start. As it became clear that the lab was telling infected people that they had tested negative for the virus, company officials nonetheless expanded the reach of the lab’s testing. The company declined to comment for ProPublica’s previous stories on these problems.

The rule will go into effect over a four-year period. Within two years, test-makers will be expected to meet registration and listing requirements, among others, which is “a critical part of this rule,” according to Cara Tenenbaum, a former FDA policy adviser whose consultancy has advocated for more active oversight.

“At least knowing what is out there will be huge,” she said in an email.

High-risk tests will need to meet new FDA review requirements before reaching the marketplace starting in November 2027. Moderate-risk and low-risk tests will need to do the same starting in May 2028. It’s unclear how prenatal screening tests would be categorized.

The agency generally will not enforce some or all requirements for certain LDTs, including tests that were first marketed before the rule was issued and have not since been modified or have been modified in certain limited ways.

The agency will also generally not enforce some or all requirements for tests used within the Veterans Health Administration or the Department of Defense, as well as certain tests that meet other narrow conditions.

Nonetheless, the rule marks a massive shift in the FDA’s approach to a sector that touches millions. “The agency cannot stand by while Americans continue to rely on results of these tests without assurance that they work,” FDA commissioner Robert Califf said in an agency news release.

The final rule, he added, aims to “help ensure that important health care decisions are made based on test results that patients and health care providers can trust.”

The FDA tried to rein in the lab tests a decade ago, issuing a draft guidance in 2014. That prompted a two-year backlash from opponents. The agency ultimately dropped it.

Some critics have argued that regulation of LDTs should happen through legislation rather than rulemaking. But many also largely opposed a bipartisan bill in 2022 that came the closest to passing before ultimately being dropped at the end of the year. Later efforts to move a similar bill forward have not gained traction in Congress.

Laurie Menser, chief executive of the Association for Molecular Pathology, said in an emailed statement that the association is “very disappointed” in the new rule.

“It’s unfortunate the agency continues to overstep its authority and bypass the country’s legislative process,” Menser said. “AMP is currently reviewing the different aspects of the rule and assessing the many implications for our members and patient care.”

Lurie, who was closely involved with the FDA effort to address the tests a decade ago, said the rule has been a long time coming. “People had identified this problem a very long time ago, and wanted to take action, but found themselves stymied by opposition,” he said.

“I think that it shows real courage on the part of the agency, as well as commitment to the public health, to take this step,” he added.

by Debbie Cenziper, ProPublica; Michael D. Sallah, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; and Julian Andreone, Medill Investigative Lab

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After years of legal battles, Philips has agreed to pay more than $1 billion to settle lawsuits waged by thousands of people who say they were injured by breathing machines capable of releasing toxic particles and fumes into their noses, mouths and lungs.

The proposed settlement unveiled Monday between the global manufacturer and plaintiffs’ lawyers will effectively end more than 700 lawsuits filed after the 2021 recall of millions of the company’s widely used sleep apnea devices and ventilators.

More than 50,000 people are involved in the litigation. It has yet to be determined how many will have claims that fall under the terms of the settlement, which will be filed in federal court in Pittsburgh.

Philips also agreed to provide $25 million to cover the cost of medical monitoring for users who are fearful that hazardous chemicals emitted from the machines could lead to long-term harm, including cancer. Since 2021, the Food and Drug Administration has received more than 500 reports of deaths reportedly associated with the machines since 2021.

Plaintiffs have said that Philips, which built the devices at two factories near Pittsburgh, should be held accountable for failing to pull the machines off the shelves years ago.

“I still don’t have my husband,” said Shawne Thomas of Louisiana, whose 51-year-old husband, Rodney, died from a rare form of nose and throat cancer in 2021 after using one of the recalled machines for months. “But it sounds like a good amount of money coming out of their pocket, so it makes me feel a little bit happier.”

An investigation by ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last year revealed that Philips suppressed thousands of complaints about an industrial foam fitted inside the machines that could break down and send potentially dangerous material into the masks worn by users. Federal law requires medical device makers to turn over such reports to the FDA within 30 days.

Under the terms of the settlement, Philips did not admit fault or liability. In the company’s first quarter financial report on Monday, CEO Roy Jakobs said the settlement provides the company with a “clear path forward for sustainable value creation.”

He also cited what he called “reassuring test results” for the recalled machines.

In launching the recall, Philips said the degrading foam inside the machines could cause serious harm and carried cancer-causing materials. The company has since walked back those findings, saying further testing did not indicate using the devices could result in “appreciable harm to health.”

ProPublica and the Post-Gazette found that the FDA repeatedly questioned the safety claims by Philips, saying the tests were not adequate and further evaluation was needed. The news organizations obtained several reports detailing the results of tests on the foam. Those tests found that the material tested positive for genotoxicity, the ability of chemicals to cause cells to mutate, which can cause cancer.

This month, under the terms of a consent decree with the federal government, the company agreed to hire an independent safety monitor and submit to regular inspections for five years. Philips also agreed to stop selling its sleep apnea devices in the United States until the conditions in the agreement were met. The agreement does not restrict Philips from selling its breathing machines in other countries.

Last year, Philips also agreed to pay more than $479 million to compensate customers for the cost of the defective machines — an amount that plaintiffs’ lawyers say is now expected to top $600 million.

Several medical experts interviewed by ProPublica and the Post-Gazette say that it could take years to determine whether links exist between the machines and certain diseases, but that they believe the company should have warned the public about the health risks years earlier.

“I’m glad they’re taking responsibility for what they did because they knew,” said Louisiana Sheriff Brett Stassi, who was diagnosed with kidney cancer and rushed into surgery in 2021 after using one of the recalled devices for four years. “They put dollars over lives in my book.”

A criminal probe by the U.S. Department of Justice is ongoing, and the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is launching an inquiry of the FDA’s oversight of medical device recalls for the first time in years.

Philips has said it is cooperating with authorities.

The FDA has defended its handling of the crisis, saying it acted as soon as it learned of the safety concerns in April 2021, just weeks before Philips launched the recall.

“The FDA welcomes the opportunity for GAO review of the agency’s oversight of medical device recalls,” the agency said in a statement early this year.

by Jake Pearson

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Across the country, states are reexamining their approaches to guardianship, overhauling decades-old laws to better protect vulnerable adults who, because of their age or ailment, can no longer care for themselves.

In Pennsylvania, legislators recently passed a sweeping bill requiring professional guardians to pass a certification exam in order to serve, among other changes. And in Illinois, lawmakers are seeking to make it harder for private guardians to profit off of vulnerable wards who have nobody else to look after them.

But in New York, where more than 28,000 people rely on guardians to ensure their personal and financial welfare, and where judges, lawyers and advocates have been warning of a growing crisis in the system, elected officials have taken little action.

The $237 billion state budget passed by the Legislature this month includes no new funding to support guardianship services, despite reporting by ProPublica that showed how the state’s system is in shambles, with authorities straining to ensure proper care of elderly and sick wards.

Guardianship Access New York, a coalition of nonprofit providers, had sought a modest sum from legislators: just $5 million to help them manage the finances and health care of poor adults who have nobody else to look after them and little to no money to pay for a private guardian — a group known in the industry as the “unbefriended.” That would have been a significant increase over the $1 million legislators had previously allotted to fund a statewide hotline that hundreds of people have consulted on behalf of friends or family.

But the budget passed April 20 only renewed the $1 million that funds the hotline.

“We’re disappointed that the Legislature is still unwilling to invest in this underfunded mandate that leaves so many people hurting,” said Brianna McKinney, who oversees advocacy for Project Guardianship, a nonprofit that serves as guardian to about 160 New York City wards.

As ProPublica reported last month, there aren’t enough guardians in New York for all of the people judges have found to be in need of one. The system relies on private attorneys, who experts say frequently refuse to take on people who do not have substantial assets, and a small network of nonprofits, two of which have shuttered in recent years because of financial constraints.

Oversight of guardians is also threadbare, ProPublica found. In New York City there are 17,411 people in guardianships but only 157 examiners to scrutinize the reports guardians must file documenting wards’ finances and care, according to state court data. With such thin ranks, reviews can take years to complete, during which time vulnerable wards have been defrauded and neglected.

In recent years, the guardianships of celebrities like Britney Spears and former NFL star Michael Oher have captured the public’s interest and prompted scrutiny of the legal arrangements.

In New York, a recent Lifetime documentary about the former talk show host Wendy Williams — and her guardian’s unsuccessful effort to prevent it from airing — has put an even brighter spotlight on the state’s guardianship system, raising questions of court oversight amid allegations of exploitation and improper care.

Spokespeople for Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Gov. Kathy Hochul, the state’s most powerful Democrats who negotiated the spending bills, didn’t respond to questions about the lack of guardianship funding in the latest budget or the prospect of future funding.

That includes whether an additional $3 million earmarked for the state’s Office for the Aging’s budget to fund “various aging initiatives” would be used to finance guardianship providers.

Agency spokesperson Roger Noyes said a plan proposed by Hochul to confront the needs of the state’s aging population “presents an opportunity for additional policy focus on guardianship access, programmatic or structural changes, and alternatives to guardianship.” But the governor has provided few specifics on how her proposal will work, particularly with respect to combating elder abuse, a key pillar of the plan.

Many people in guardianship today are elderly and suffer from dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and other ailments that require assistance, according to judges. And advocates say the demand for services will only grow, with the state estimating a population of 5.6 million New Yorkers over 60 by 2030, one of the largest concentrations in the country.

In Illinois, the state’s aging population is driving the guardianship debate. Democratic Rep. Terra Costa Howard, a lawyer, said she was inspired to write legislation after her own representation of an elderly ward. She learned that a private guardianship company and a prominent law firm representing hospitals appeared to be working together, running up costly bills at the ward’s expense.

“What this little piece of legislation has uncovered is a huge problem — elder care is a big, big mess,” Costa Howard told ProPublica. “In our chamber, in our legislature, this is an issue people are willing to fight for. People weren’t paying attention to this until I raised it. I brought it up and now we’re going to go.”

But in New York there is neither a state legislator willing to champion reform nor are there powerful lobbying groups advocating on behalf of those in guardianship, many of whom live in assisted living facilities and nursing homes.

AARP New York said in a statement that it had dedicated its efforts elsewhere this legislative session, including securing funding to support older New Yorkers “who require home- and community-based services” as well as funding an oversight program for nursing homes and adult care facilities.

“If there are additional guardianship proposals introduced in the Legislature, AARP New York will certainly evaluate them in conjunction with our national policy and decide when or if to engage in the issue,” the statement said.

Such legislative action appears unlikely this session, which ends in June.

Sen. Kevin Thomas, a Long Island Democrat who first secured the $1 million to fund the statewide guardianship hotline and advocated for more funding this session, is leaving the Senate when his term ends next year. He didn’t respond to an interview request.

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by Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum, and David Armstrong, ProPublica

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In late 2020, Dr. Debby Day said her bosses at Cigna gave her a stark warning. Work faster, or the company might fire her.

That was a problem for Day because she felt her work was too important to be rushed. She was a medical director for the health insurer, a physician with sweeping power to approve or reject requests to pay for critical care like life-saving drugs or complex surgeries.

She had been working at Cigna for nearly 15 years, reviewing cases that nurses had flagged for denial or were unsure about. At Cigna and other insurers, nurses can greenlight payments, but denials have such serious repercussions for patients that many states require that doctors make the final call. In more recent years, though, Day said that the Cigna nurses’ work was getting sloppy. Patient files that nurses working in the Philippines sent to her, she said, increasingly had errors that could lead to wrongful denials if they were not corrected.

Day was, in her own words, persnickety. If a nurse recommended denying coverage for a cancer patient or a sick baby, she wanted to be certain it was the right thing to do. So Day said she researched guidelines, read medical studies and scrutinized patient medical records to come to the best decision. This took time. She was clearing fewer cases than many of her peers.

Some of her colleagues quickly denied requests to keep pace, she said. All a Cigna doctor had to do was cut and paste the denial language that the nurse had prepared and quickly move on to the next case, Day said. This was so common, she and another former medical director said, that people inside Cigna had a term for these kinds of speedy decisions: “click and close.”

“Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” said Day, who worked for Cigna until the late spring of 2022. “If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.”

In a written response to questions, Cigna said its medical directors are not allowed to “rubber stamp” a nurse’s recommendation for denial. In all cases, the company wrote, it expects its doctors to “perform thorough, objective, independent and accurate reviews in accordance with our coverage policies.” The company said it was unaware of the use of the term “click and close” and that “such behavior would not be tolerated.”

During Day’s final years at Cigna, the company meticulously tracked the output of its medical directors on a monthly dashboard. Cigna shared this spreadsheet with more than 70 of its doctors, allowing them to compare their tally of cases with those of their peers. Day and two other former medical directors said the dashboard sent a message loud and clear: Cigna valued speed. (ProPublica and The Capitol Forum found these other former Cigna doctors independently; Day did not refer them.) One of Day’s managers in a written performance evaluation called the spreadsheet the “productivity dashboard.”

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Measuring the speed and output of employees is common in many industries, from fast food to package delivery, but the use of these kinds of metrics in health care is controversial because the stakes are so high. It’s one thing if a rushed server forgets the fries with your burger. It’s another entirely if the pressure to act fast leads to wrongful denials of payment for vital care. Walgreens in 2022 dropped measurements of its pharmacists’ speed from their performance reviews after some alleged that practice could lead to dangerous mistakes.

ProPublica and The Capitol Forum examined Cigna’s productivity dashboards for medical directors from January and February 2022. These spreadsheets tallied the number of cases each medical director handled. Cigna gave each task a “handle time,” which the company said was the average amount of time it took its medical directors to issue a decision.

Day and others said the number was something different: the maximum amount of time they should spend on a case. Insurers often require approval in advance for expensive procedures or medicines, a process known as prior authorization. The early 2022 dashboards listed a handle time of four minutes for a prior authorization. The bulk of drug requests were to be decided in two to five minutes. Hospital discharge decisions were supposed to take four and a half minutes.

“Medical directors would message me and say, ‘We can’t do these cases in four minutes. Not if you want to do a good job,’” Day recalled.

Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers. If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.

—Dr. Debby Day, a former medical director at Cigna

As ProPublica and The Capitol Forum reported last year, Cigna built a computer program that allowed its medical directors to deny certain claims in bulk. The insurer’s doctors spent an average of just 1.2 seconds on each of those cases. Cigna at the time said the review system was created to speed up approval of claims for certain routine screenings; the company later posted a rebuttal to the story. A congressional committee and the Department of Labor launched inquiries into this Cigna program. A spokesperson for Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chair of the congressional committee, said Rodgers continues to monitor the situation after Cigna shared some details about its process. The Labor Department is still examining such practices.

One figure on Cigna’s January and February 2022 dashboards was like a productivity score; the news organizations found that this number reflects the pace at which a medical director clears cases.

Cigna said it was incorrect to call that figure on its dashboard a productivity score and said its “view on productivity is defined by a range of factors beyond elements included in a single spreadsheet.” In addition, the company told the news organizations, “The copy of the dashboard that you have is inaccurate and secondary calculations made using its contents may also be inaccurate.” The news organizations asked what was inaccurate, but the company wouldn’t elaborate.

Nevertheless, Cigna said that because the dashboard created “inadvertent confusion” the company was “reassessing its use.”

Day was afraid to look at the dashboards. Anyone could see that by Cigna’s measures, she was a laggard. In January 2022, only a third of her peers had lower scores, and in February 2022, it was just a quarter.

In a recorded phone call and in emails with supervisors, Day complained that Cigna’s metrics failed to account for the quality of decisions. She said she and others asked higher-ups how often medical director decisions were overturned on appeal but nobody would say.

Day gave Cigna written permission to discuss her employment with ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

The company described Day as a “disgruntled former employee” and said her “personal view is not an accurate representation of the work of the many medical directors and clinicians we employ.” Cigna added that prior authorization requests are often time-sensitive and the company’s “mission is to ensure our patients receive the right care as quickly as possible.”

Cigna rejected the assertions that denying cases was an effective way of working faster. “Even if medical directors were incentivized to review more claims — which they are not — it makes no sense to suggest that this incentivizes denials; it would be far quicker to approve all claims,” the company spokesperson wrote. The insurer said that denials take more time because they require a deeper review of clinical data, potentially requesting additional reviews by senior clinical directors, drafting denial letters and possibly phoning the treating physicians.

But another doctor who had worked at Cigna also said that denying a request for payment was far quicker than approving one since the nurses served up language that could be used to justify the denial. That former Cigna medical director said, “Sometimes you just have to accept the nurse and click and close if you had too much work.” (That doctor asked not to be named because they feared repercussions if they commented publicly.)

When Debby Day got her job at Cigna in November 2005, she thought it was a godsend.

She had been working for a health insurance startup in North Carolina. The charismatic founder of the company, Day said, had told her and a handful of principal executives to expect a windfall when the company went public. That never happened, and Day was eventually left with no job and no severance.

When a recruiter mentioned the medical director job at Cigna, it sounded like a perfect fit. The job was based in North Carolina, but Cigna didn’t mind that she was licensed in California, where she did her residency at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. She was ready to leave the executive track, and the position allowed her to put her medical training to good use without the daily grind of working in a clinic.

The daughter of an ophthalmologist, Day had watched her father perform eye surgery when she was a child, and she found medicine fascinating. When Day started practicing, she learned quickly that while she enjoyed the intellectual challenges of medicine, the hands-on work of seeing patients drained her. As a medical director, she said, “I could really take care of patients without having to talk to them all day long.”

Cigna, like all health insurers, makes patients get approval in advance for certain treatments. Day became one of the people who reviewed these prior authorization requests, deciding what to cover and what to deny. Everyone Day worked with was under one roof in Raleigh, North Carolina. The office buzzed with conversations among colleagues, and she was able to consult with specialists on complex cases.

She never felt pressure to do anything but make the right decision for the patient. At the same time, she said, she didn’t hesitate to reject treatment she thought was improper.

Day describes herself as persnickety but feels that the time she spent reviewing case files was essential to reaching the right decision. (Andrea Bruce for ProPublica)

A couple years into her time at Cigna, Day noticed some doctors prescribing a costly treatment called intravenous immunoglobulin, or IVIG, that helps patients with weakened immune systems fight off infections. Only she found they were prescribing it in cases where it didn’t make any medical sense. That wasn’t good for patients or for Cigna. “Some of these guys were pouring it into every patient they could get their hands on and then making hundreds of thousands of dollars billing for it,” she recalled.

At the time, Cigna didn’t have a policy for when IVIG should be used, so Day developed one based on the scientific evidence available at the time. Day said this saved millions of dollars and that Cigna rewarded her with bonuses and stock options.

“In my head I truly believed that you could marry good health care with business,” she said.

As Day neared the end of her first decade at Cigna, the company closed regional offices in favor of a nationwide review system, she said. With medical directors working from home, Day could no longer pop down the hallway to consult with doctors in other specialities.

Cigna had used a productivity dashboard for years, but by 2019, these metrics began playing a more prominent role in the company’s evaluations of medical directors, Day said. Now, making a fast decision seemed more important than making the right decision, she said. In February 2019 emails to her managers, Day openly questioned this system.

Her boss responded: “We all understand that many cases are involved and take more time,” he wrote. “We have tried to account for that additional time in the allotment allowed for certain cases.”

Still, he made it clear that transaction volume — the metric on the dashboard that was similar to a productivity score — was one of the factors “we use to determine merit raises, bonus” and stock awards. When asked about this, Cigna said that “any assertion that our Medical Directors’ compensation (cash or stock) is tied to denials or their handle time for cases is false.”

In that same 2019 email, Day’s boss added, “We want to assist every medical director who wishes to improve his or her efficiency.”

Day shot back, “Some of our newer MDs are quite terrified of the ‘counting,’” she wrote. “All ask — ‘how is quality measured?’”

Soon, Day realized that her boss wasn’t talking in the abstract about improving efficiency; he was talking about her. She learned that managers were going to help her pick up the pace of her reviews.

When bosses reached out, they didn’t discuss whether she was making the right call, only how long it took her to decide, she said.

In my head I truly believed that you could marry good health care with business.

—Day

By then, Day said, Cigna had shifted much of the nursing work to the Philippines. She found mistakes in the case files that these nurses sent. In an email to Day, a fellow medical director lamented the amount of time it took to untangle one case and said the reports by “the overseas nurses” were “messes.”

Some of the more astonishing problems that Day spotted have stayed with her. In a case involving a newborn who needed an epilepsy evaluation, Day noticed that a Cigna nurse had listed the mother’s name as the patient, rather than the baby’s. Day fixed that mistake, avoiding what certainly would have been a denial. In another case, a nurse recommended denying payment for an ultrasound of the neck because the treatment wasn’t medically necessary. But the nurse had gotten the body part wrong. It was a hip that was injured, and the imaging was needed. An appeal that landed on Day’s desk involved Cigna’s decision to reject payment for a test because it wasn’t medically necessary for a patient with a sexually transmitted disease. But Day figured out that the patient had toenail fungus, not an STD.

Day said her bosses didn’t want to hear that she was catching errors. By October 2020, Cigna had placed Day on a performance improvement plan that required her to raise her “productivity level” — referring to the score on the dashboard — to at least 70%, which would be a significant jump for her but was slightly below the median for medical directors. The company made the consequences crystal clear: If she failed to successfully complete the plan, she could be terminated.

ProPublica and The Capitol Forum asked Cigna how it calculated that score, but the company wouldn’t say. “Transaction volume helps gauge productivity and efficiency — the amount of work done, not the speed at which it is done,” a Cigna spokesperson wrote. The company said this metric measured the time a medical director spent on tasks involving medical judgment versus other work, such as internal meetings or training.

On the early 2022 productivity dashboard, though, a different calculation could explain Day’s score, and this math reflects how fast medical directors reviewed cases. ProPublica and The Capitol Forum multiplied the number of cases Day handled by the time Cigna allotted for each type of case, then divided that total by the hours she worked that month. The resulting percentage equaled her score. Medical directors who spent every available minute of their workdays clearing cases within the time constraints Cigna set would score at least 100%. Indeed, some medical directors had scores greater than 100%, meaning they cleared cases in even less than the allotted time. The newsrooms’ formula accurately reproduced the scores of 87% of the Cigna doctors listed; the scores of all but one of the rest fell within 1 to 2 percentage points of the number generated by this formula. When asked about this formula, Cigna said it may be inaccurate but didn’t elaborate.

Day said her bosses told her that the way to boost her score was to review more cases during her normal work hours.

Responding to questions, Cigna said the productivity dashboard was “primarily used to ensure that we have enough medical directors to perform the amount and type of work that needs to be done.” It is not used, the company said, to evaluate the performance of medical directors or track the speed at which individual doctors do their work.

Cigna, however, later said of the dashboard that “in the unusual situation that a medical director is a significant outlier to peers performing similar types of reviews, managers might use this metric as one data point to understand and discuss the variance with the medical director.” It also said Day was placed on a performance improvement plan “to help her meet the most basic standards to support patient care.”

During the time Day spent on the performance improvement plan, she refused to change her approach, which she felt was necessary to make the right call.

In December 2020, she appealed to the human resources department, figuring that colleagues there would see that it was wrong to fire a medical director for taking care to decide critical medical questions.

She was wrong.

“You feel that the time constraints/metrics, which are in place to review these cases are unreasonable, for some cases are very complex consisting of multiple pages to review,” a Cigna human resources employee wrote, summing up Day’s feelings as the matter escalated.

And while Day’s supervisor “appreciates your attention to detail,” the human resources employee wrote, he “also realizes that there are metrics in place that he must hold everyone to.”

When asked about this, Cigna said, “Dr. Day raised questions about her performance improvement plan through appropriate internal ethics channels available to all employees, and there was no wrongdoing found.”

Eventually, the daily stress of being pushed to work faster coupled with the threat of being fired took a toll on Day. Sleepless and fighting depression, Day was at the breaking point.

“I actually sort of had a mental breakdown,” she recalled.

At the end of the day, we need to get your productivity up and we don’t have a lot of time to do that.

—Day’s supervisor

On a recorded call with her boss about her lagging productivity score, Day brought the subject back to the quality of the decisions she was making. Her boss made it sound like Day was a broken record.

“We have the same discussion every time we talk,” he said. While saying “nobody’s asking you not to do quality work,” her boss said, “you must know I just have to redirect our discussion.”

But Day continued: “When there is no measurement of quality, then the discussion will continue to have that element to it.”

The supervisor said he heard Day’s concerns “loud and clear” but warned that “at the end of the day, we need to get your productivity up and we don’t have a lot of time to do that.”

The focus on metrics was proof Cigna was losing its way, Day told her boss. When she started working at Cigna 15 years earlier, there was a “commitment to quality and taking care of our customers.” Day said that it was still important to her and other medical directors that “we go home at the end of the day and think we’ve done a good job for Cigna.”

In a response to questions, Cigna said the supervisor, who works in California, was unaware that he was being recorded and that under that state’s laws, it is illegal to record a private phone call without all parties’ consent. Day said that she was in North Carolina during the call and that North Carolina law allows a person on a call to record without getting the consent of others.

Day took a monthslong leave from the job in mid-2021 that allowed her to work part time, and she found a therapist who helped her manage the depression. When she returned, Day said, it was more of the same.

In the late spring of 2022 she decided to retire from Cigna.

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Maya Miller contributed reporting.

by Lee Zurik, Samantha Sunne and Dannah Sauer, WVUE-TV, data analysis by Joel Jacobs, ProPublica

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The city of Gretna, Louisiana, in the shadow of New Orleans, brings in more money through fines and related fees than some larger cities in the state. An investigation by WVUE-TV and ProPublica shows that much of that money comes from drivers who rack up multiple violations and hefty fines.

Defendants in Gretna’s mayor’s court, a unique justice system found only in Louisiana and Ohio, are charged with more violations — and face greater fines as a result — than those in seven other cities and towns we looked at. Many of those charges in Gretna are for nonmoving violations such as an expired license plate or vehicle inspection sticker.

And if a defendant misses a payment and doesn’t come to court to explain why, the court often adds a contempt charge, with an additional $150 fine. About half of Gretna’s cases over a three-year period included contempt charges.

A city representative said that officers charge people with violations only when they have probable cause, and that such fines deter motorists from breaking the law. A former New Orleans police chief, however, said cities can get people to follow the law without issuing lots of tickets.

How We Reported This Story

For this story we obtained via a public records request a dataset of all charges filed in Gretna’s mayor’s court from 2020 through 2022. Nearly 21,000 cases were included in the data, most of which consisted of traffic violations.

We obtained similar data for seven other municipalities in southeastern Louisiana. These included six towns with mayor’s courts — Harahan, Kenner, Covington, Ponchatoula, Grand Isle and Westwego — as well as the city of New Orleans, which has traffic and municipal courts. For municipalities with mayor’s courts, we obtained data for the same time period; for New Orleans we obtained data for 2022.

We confirmed with municipalities that the data accounted for all court costs and fees as of the date they were provided. Fine amounts for cases that were open when the data was provided may have changed since.

We calculated the average fines and fees for all cases in each town. Gretna had the highest average amount levied: $457 per case. We found this was 67% higher than the average of all the other municipalities’ average per case, which was $273. We also calculated the number of violations per case, not including contempt charges; again, Gretna was the highest, with 2.4 violations per case, compared with an average of 1.4 across the other municipalities.

These figures include all cases, both open and closed, as well as a relatively small number of cases involving nontraffic violations. Fines are often reduced when people go to court, so we also analyzed fines for open and closed cases separately, as well as traffic cases alone. Across all those analyses, Gretna’s assessments per case and the number of violations remained above average compared with other towns.

In addition, we studied the most common violations in Gretna, finding that a large number were nonmoving violations. Nearly half of all violations (not including contempt of court) were for violations of law related to driver’s licenses, vehicle registration or insurance or inspection stickers.

Contempt of court was charged in about half of the cases in Gretna, which was more than other towns with comparable data. A few municipalities were excluded from this comparison because they did not list contempt as a separate charge.

We used audits on file with the state to compare how much Gretna collected in fines and forfeitures to other municipalities. Over several months last year, we reviewed annual audits for all 301 municipalities and two combined city-parish governments required to file reports with the state. A small number of audits did not include a line item for fines and forfeitures. Gretna had the highest revenue from fines and forfeitures of any town with a mayor’s court, according to our review, and the third highest of any municipality.

There is no official government definition of fines and forfeitures in those audits, but the terms generally cover penalties for breaking the law and associated fees. In some places, they could include collections outside court, such as library fines and traffic camera tickets. Gretna’s fines and forfeitures include revenue from traffic cameras, which don’t go through mayor’s court. But the city’s revenue from mayor’s court alone in fiscal year 2022 exceeded most cities and towns’ overall collections in fines and forfeitures, including some larger cities.

by Jeremy Schwartz

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A Texas state appeals court on Thursday ordered the dismissal of a 2018 defamation lawsuit against ProPublica and the Houston Chronicle brought by famed Houston heart surgeon Dr. O.H. “Bud” Frazier, ruling that a 2018 investigation into the doctor was a “fair, true, and impartial account” of accusations against him.

Frazier was also ordered to pay the publications’ attorneys fees related to the appeal.

Frazier filed the suit in Harris County District Court, challenging a 2018 story and subsequent reporting that examined concerns with the doctor’s conduct, including that a hospital investigation had found that Frazier and his team implanted experimental heart pumps in patients who did not meet medical criteria to be included in clinical trials.

Frazier, a high profile heart transplant surgeon at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center and the Texas Heart Institute, claimed that the articles included errors and misleading statements “calculated to falsely portray Dr. Frazier as an inhumane physician.”

The suit also named the stories’ authors, Charles Ornstein of ProPublica and Mike Hixenbaugh, then of the Chronicle, as defendants.

The news outlets sought to dismiss the lawsuit under the 2011 Texas Citizens Participation Act, which allows for speedy dismissals of what the Texas Supreme Court has defined as “retaliatory lawsuits that seek to intimidate or silence (citizens) on matters of public concern” or “chill First Amendment rights.”

The appeals court decision potentially signals the close of a nearly six-year legal battle.

In 2018, Harris County District Judge Wesley Ward first denied the news outlets’ motion to dismiss under the TCPA, ruling that Frazier had shown enough evidence to establish his defamation claim. The news outlets appealed the ruling to the First District Court of Appeals in Houston, which determined in January 2020 that the trial court had failed to consider the news outlets’ evidence and arguments and sent the case back to the trial court. Frazier appealed the appeals court ruling to the Supreme Court of Texas, which denied his petition.

In March 2022, the district court once again denied the news outlets’ motion to dismiss under the TCPA. The publications filed a second appeal two months later, arguing Frazier had failed to establish the elements of his defamation claim.

This time, the appeals court definitively reversed the lower court’s decision and on Thursday ordered the trial court to dismiss the case, concluding that the news outlets “established by a preponderance of the evidence their defenses of substantial truth and nonactionable opinion.”

“This is a huge victory for journalism and the truth on an issue of immense public importance,” said Jeremy Kutner, ProPublica’s general counsel. “After six long years, the court found what was clear to every reader of this story. It was fair, accurate and backed up by a mountain of documentation and evidence. However important their contributions to society, pioneering leaders are not above scrutiny.”

Neither Frazier nor his attorneys immediately responded to a request for comment.

ProPublica was represented by Laura Prather and Catherine Robb of Haynes and Boone LLP.

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by Lexi Churchill and Jessica Priest

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Last year, in an effort to bring greater transparency to local elections, the Texas Legislature mandated that school districts, municipalities and other jurisdictions post campaign finance reports online rather than stow them away in filing cabinets.

But many agencies appear to be violating the law that took effect in September.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune examined 35 school districts that held trustee elections in November and found none that had posted all of the required disclosures online that show candidates’ fundraising and spending. (Two of the districts did not respond to questions that would allow us to determine whether they were missing these reports.) And the agency tasked with enforcing the rules for thousands of local jurisdictions does not have any staff dedicated to checking their websites for compliance.

“The public not having access to those records because they’re not turned in or not posted in a timely fashion means that the public can’t make an informed decision based on where that candidate’s financial support is coming from,” said Erin Zwiener, a Democratic state representative from Driftwood who has pushed for campaign finance reform.

The interest in more transparency in local elections is bipartisan. “The local level has an amazing amount of funding and activity going through their respective districts, whether it be a school district, the city councils and the counties,” said Republican Carl Tepper, the state representative from Lubbock who authored the bill.

Of all the local government offices now required to upload campaign finance information online, the newsrooms focused on school boards because of the growing push by hard-line conservatives to reshape the elected bodies and advance vouchers as an alternative to public schools. Over the past several years, school boards across the country have shifted from traditionally nonpartisan bodies to increasingly polarized ones grappling with politically charged issues like mask mandates, book bans and bathroom policies for transgender people.

“If candidates are being pushed and funded to fight a proxy culture war in our school districts, I hope that that information can at least be public and easily available and that we can know how frequently that’s happening in Texas,” Zwiener said in an interview.

ProPublica and the Tribune contacted each of the school districts to ask about the missing documents. Some districts said they were aware of the mandate but still had not complied. Among their explanations: They did not receive enough instructions about the implementation and their websites were undergoing changes. A spokesperson for Lago Vista Independent School District, outside Austin, said simply, “Unfortunately, with the multitude of legislative mandates following the 88th session, this one got by us.”

Most often, school leaders said they had not known about the new law and subsequently uploaded the reports. The vast majority of districts, however, were still missing filings on their website because they never received or lost required reports from at least one candidate, actions that violate other parts of the state’s election law.

The newsrooms also found a handful of instances in which candidates or school districts hid donor names and parts of addresses, even though the law doesn’t allow for those redactions.

Had the late filings been submitted in one of Texas’ statewide races, they would have been flagged by the Texas Ethics Commission, the agency tasked with enforcing the state election laws, and the campaigns would have been automatically fined. For each of the 5,000 elected officials and candidates running for state office each year, the agency sends notices about upcoming filing deadlines, penalizes late filers and then considers their subsequent requests to reduce those fees. The commission also compiles all of their campaign finance reports into one searchable online database going back decades.

The agency does not follow any of these steps for local candidates. Instead, it investigates only when it receives a complaint.

None of the districts that responded to our questions sent a complaint to the commission. (The Texas Ethics Commission does not require them to do so.)

Matthew Wilson, an associate professor of political science at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said it is reasonable to cut districts some slack for now because it’s a new requirement. But over time, without effective enforcement, local agencies won’t feel any pressure to comply with the new law.

“It’s one thing to have a law, but if it’s a law for the violation of which no one ever gets punished, you’re going to have a low level of compliance,” he said. “The ball is really in the court of TEC to decide whether this law is going to have teeth.”

The new law applies to elected officials and candidates seeking local positions across the state’s 254 counties, more than 1,000 school districts and roughly 1,200 cities and towns. In the past, their campaign finance details were kept on handwritten forms that offices were required to keep on file for two years before destroying them. They now have to be maintained online for five years.

Of the districts that uploaded their records after being contacted by ProPublica and the Tribune, most candidates raised a few thousand dollars or less, though the newsrooms found a few who had raised at least $10,000 or had the support of political action committees. Voters did not have easy access to this information at the time of the elections, which was the law’s intent.

One candidate in West Texas, Joshua Guinn, raised more than $30,000 in his run for Midland ISD school board. During a public forum in October, a few weeks before the election, Guinn said his large fundraising haul was attributable to “family, friends, just people that believe in me.” His filings showed that he spent more than $20,000 on advertising and consulting services provided by CAZ Consulting, a firm that the Texas Observer has connected to a widespread effort to support far-right candidates. Guinn ultimately lost his race to the former board president.

A spokesperson for Midland ISD said the district aims to be compliant with all legislative requirements but that it did not receive a specific notification from TEC or state education regulators about the new law. Christopher Zook Jr., president of CAZ Consulting, said in an email, “All campaign finance reports should be easily accessible to the public. Publicly available finance reports allow for greater transparency in the political process for everyone.”

In a Houston-area school district, Aldine ISD, campaign finance reports were not posted online for seven of the 10 candidates seeking a position on the board. Once the newsrooms reached out, the district uploaded a report from incumbent William Randolph Bates Jr. It showed that he raised more than $30,000, including $4,000 from two PACs. But the school district said Bates and six other candidates did not turn in their mandated filings before the election. Bates won reelection.

Neither Guinn nor Bates responded to interview requests.

And until we asked, Princeton ISD, about 40 miles north of Dallas, did not post the campaign finance reports for any of the four candidates seeking two at-large positions on the school board in November. This made it more difficult for voters to know who was behind a mailer sent by the Collin Conservatives United PAC. The two-sided pamphlet contrasted incumbent school board President Cyndi Darland, whom it said “we can trust,” against another candidate, Starla Sharpe, whom it claimed will encourage a “woke agenda,” won’t stop critical race theory and “won’t get rid of sexually explicit materials that harm our children.”

Sharpe said in an interview with the news organizations that the mailer contained false statements about her and that Darland told her she had nothing to do with the mailer. But when the district posted Darland’s report following our inquiries, it revealed that she contributed to the PAC behind the mailer.

“I absolutely think this would have been important for voters to be aware of and to see the caliber of the individuals that you are voting for and the integrity they have,” Sharpe said.

Darland declined a phone interview and did not answer questions by email because she said she had been in a car wreck and was in pain and on medication. Laura Dawley, treasurer of the Collin Conservatives United PAC, declined to comment. Darland and Sharpe won the two open seats.

Political activity within local races like school boards has not been a major concern until the last few election cycles, according to Brendan Glavin, deputy research director at OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that collects state and federal campaign finance data. Glavin said it is somewhat common for states to have local candidates’ filings remain at the local level, given those races historically do not generate a lot of money and were not considered overtly political.

“This is an area where the disclosure law is lagging behind what is becoming the political reality,” Glavin said, as these races become higher profile and attract money from outside the community.

Tepper, the Lubbock representative, began last year’s legislative session with a far more ambitious proposal to create a searchable database for all filings. But he quickly abandoned the idea once TEC officials told him it would cost around $20 million to maintain — a fraction of the cost of the state’s leading priorities like its $148 million program to bus newly arriving migrants out of state. Tepper told the newsrooms he thought the estimate was “a little outlandish” but decided to take “the path of least resistance” with his online posting idea instead.

Later that session, Zwiener alternatively proposed to require all local candidates and officeholders who raise or spend more than $25,000 to send their reports to TEC, but the Legislature did not move forward with that idea either.

TEC Executive Director J.R. Johnson said Tepper’s initial proposal would have increased the agency’s workload from 5,000 filers currently to nearly 50,000 filers each year if just two candidates ran for every local office.

Johnson would not comment on whether the agency has enough funding to keep up with its current tasks but instead referred the news organizations to the commission’s reports to the Legislature, which detail its rapidly increasing workload, “persistent staffing shortages” and practically stagnant budget.

The commission wrote that campaign finance reports have been “growing dramatically,” with statewide candidates’ average contributions quadrupling from $5.6 million in 2018 to $25.7 million in 2022. The resulting reports are lengthy — one surpassed 100,000 pages — and “have been testing the limits of the TEC’s server hardware for years,” the agency wrote. Yet when the commission requested funding to help the system run smoother in 2022, lawmakers denied the request. Shortly after, the servers failed.

All other regulatory agencies in the state receive more funding than TEC, the office wrote in a report to the Legislature, including the Texas Racing Commission, which oversees horse and greyhound races. “We were unable to find any state that invested less in its ethics agency on a per capita basis,” the report said.

The Legislature did increase the agency’s budget by about $1.2 million last year, which Johnson said has helped prevent turnover.

Johnson said the commission has made “significant efforts” to ensure that local authorities know about the new law, such as sending notices and presenting at the annual secretary of state conference for local jurisdictions, but that it can take time for entities to become educated about an updated requirement.

Tepper said he hopes the lack of compliance was due to the districts not knowing about the updated requirement and not flouting the law. He said in an interview that he appreciated the newsrooms “calling around and putting some spotlight on this so maybe they’ll be informed now and can comply with the state law.”

Methodology

The newsrooms aimed to examine compliance among all of the districts with November 2023 trustee elections, the first races since the new law went into effect in September. We reached out to more than a dozen statewide election and education agencies and associations to locate a calendar with all school board races dates, but none could provide one. In the absence of an official source, the Tribune and ProPublica pieced together our own list of November races through media clips and contacted 35 school districts.

Of those, we did not find any that were in full compliance with the state’s election laws. Two districts did not respond to questions that would allow us to determine whether they followed the rules. They are Spring ISD in north Houston, and Pleasant Grove ISD in East Texas.

Of the 33 districts we found out of compliance with state election laws, 21 had at least some reports on file but had not uploaded them, which broke the new regulation established by House Bill 2626. At least 16 of those districts were missing at least one report, though typically multiple reports, that they never received from candidates. Most of these districts have since uploaded their missing reports, though two districts have still not done so: New Caney and Shepherd ISDs, north of Houston.

The 12 other districts said they either never got any filings from candidates or they lost the records that should have been posted online. The ethics commission told the newsrooms this is not technically a violation of HB 2626, but it breaks other election laws that require candidates to file certain reports and mandate that districts keep them on file.

Jeremy Schwartz and Dan Keemahill contributed research.

by Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WPLN/Nashville Public Radio. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A bill that would strengthen oversight of Tennessee’s juvenile detention centers has failed, despite a concerted push for reform after multiple county-run facilities were found to be locking children alone in cells.

The bill was introduced in the state legislature in January after a WPLN and ProPublica investigation last year reported that seclusion was used as punishment for minor rule infractions like laughing during meals or talking during class. One facility, the Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center in Knoxville, was particularly reliant on seclusion, in violation of state laws and standards that banned the practice as a form of discipline.

“If we can’t get behind independent oversight and transparency as a good thing in the juvenile justice system, there will never be meaningful accountability and our system can’t change for the better,” Zoe Jamail of Disability Rights Tennessee said. “So it is frustrating and disappointing.”

The oversight bill aimed to give an independent agency the power to require changes at facilities that violate state standards, effectively forcing Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services to act.

Currently, the ombudsman at that agency, the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, responds to family complaints about DCS but doesn’t have enforcement power. Under the bill, if a facility didn’t follow those recommendations, the department would have been required to suspend the site’s license or stop placing kids there until the violations are fixed.

It was sponsored by two prominent Republicans and one Democrat, and a version of the legislation had the department’s backing. It wouldn’t have cost the state any money, according to the bill’s fiscal note.

Usually in Tennessee, that would be a recipe for a bill to become a law. But the legislation was sent to what is called “summer study,” a maneuver that allows lawmakers to continue working on the legislation but is typically used to effectively kill a bill. Its sponsors and child welfare advocates are baffled as to why.

“I can’t think of a reason for not wanting oversight unless there’s something to hide,” Jamail said.

One of the first signs of trouble occurred when the bill was heard in a House subcommittee in late March. State Rep. Andrew Farmer, an East Tennessee Republican who was not involved in the bill’s creation, introduced an amendment that removed the robust oversight powers. That move boiled the bill down to little more than one sentence, requiring DCS to publish its inspection reports online.

Rep. Andrew Farmer, R-Sevierville, said he wanted to repeal a law that strictly limited the seclusion of children at juvenile detention centers. (George Walker IV/AP)

After the hearing, Farmer said he was unfamiliar with WPLN and ProPublica’s reporting on the Bean Center that bill sponsors said inspired the legislation. He said he opposed the original legislation because of how much state oversight it introduced, and he criticized the sponsors for not clearly explaining the reasons for the bill.

“I think there was a failure to communicate the issue that they seek to address and establish a reason why they went from a county-run facility in Knoxville to try to have this sort of intrusion all over the state,” Farmer said.

State Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Nashville Democrat and sponsor of the original bill, said she believes part of the reason the bill failed was the influence of Jason Crews, who runs privately operated juvenile detention and residential treatment centers in Tennessee. Campbell and others working on the bill said a lobbyist for Crews’ business spoke to them about removing privately run facilities from the bill. One amendment filed in the House would have done just that.

“It really does feel like this is about the lobbying influence that Jason Crews has in the legislature,” Campbell said.

Crews is the executive director of Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center as well as Wayne Halfway House, a company that also operates residential treatment centers for kids in Tennessee and Florida.

WPLN and ProPublica reached out to Crews for comment. His spokesperson emailed a statement from Nicole Polk, the government affairs director with Wayne Halfway House.

Polk said the company had concerns about the bill giving regulatory power to an independent agency “without more extensive consideration about whether it’s a good idea and how such a step would affect accountability in the governance of youth corrections in Tennessee. The legislature clearly agrees with that concern.”

In addition to lobbying against the bill, Crews has donated to the campaigns of the lawmakers who sunk the bill’s chances. Rep. William Lamberth, a Republican from Middle Tennessee who sent the bill to “summer study,” has received $13,000 from Crews’ super PAC, Focus PAC, since 2021. Farmer received $4,500 from the PAC since 2021. One of Crews’ facilities, Mountain View Academy, is in Farmer’s district.

“Like many individuals and businesses, we participate in the electoral and policy arena,” Polk said. “We support strong leaders to serve our state, and do so through donations that are fully disclosed, within legal requirements.”

Lamberth did not respond to requests for comment. “No contribution I have accepted will ever influence my vote on a piece of legislation,” Farmer said in an emailed statement.

Farmer was one of the sponsors of the 2021 bill that limited the time children could be kept in seclusion in juvenile detention centers and put in place some of the state rules that the Bean Center was violating. Despite that, after that House hearing in March, he told WPLN that he thought that law should be repealed altogether, saying that in retrospect, he thinks facilities should have more discretion.

“Frankly, if it was up to me, I would reverse the seclusion law that we passed and be sure that youth that are violent, that attack guards, that attack other children, can be put into a place by themselves until they calm down,” Farmer said.

Richard Bean, superintendent of the center that bears his name, did not respond to requests for comment.

Research over the past decade has shown that isolating children doesn’t improve their behavior — if anything, it could worsen it. Solitary confinement can cause psychological impacts like depression, anxiety or psychosis, and young people are especially vulnerable to those effects. The majority of suicides inside juvenile correction facilities in the United States happen when a child is isolated.

State Sen. Kerry Roberts, a Republican from Middle Tennessee who chairs the government operations committee, was one of the reform bill’s sponsors. He said that in his years in the Senate, he has never seen a lawmaker who wasn’t involved in the original bill introduce an amendment that completely gutted it — let alone a member of his own party.

“Anytime you have a supermajority, you know, you’re going to have factions develop,” Roberts said. “That’s just part of the dynamic of where we are in Tennessee today.”

Roberts said he’s both surprised and disappointed that it got killed, and he doesn’t understand why.

But Roberts said the bill’s failure this year is not going to stop him from reforming the system.

“I’m just going to take the lemons and try and make some lemonade,” he said. “And we’ll see if we can’t come up with an even better, more robust inspection program than what we proposed.”

by Nicole Carr, ProPublica, and Mike Jordan, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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Ryan Millsap, a powerful Atlanta movie executive who has relied on relationships with Black and Jewish leaders to advance his business endeavors, has issued an apology after an investigative report that exposed his racist and antisemitic messages was published by ProPublica and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The apology comes as several influential government and entertainment figures acquainted with Millsap said they were disappointed by his derogatory rhetoric about “Fucking Black People” and “nasty Jews,” revealed in public records tied to an ongoing legal dispute with Millsap’s former attorney.

“Those comments were deplorable, and I don’t appreciate them,” said DeKalb County commissioner and CEO candidate Larry Johnson, who is Black.

Millsap, who is white, is a mainstay in Atlanta real estate, political and entertainment circles. He responded to the report with a statement issued three days after publication. He’d been made aware of the contents of the story weeks ahead of publication, but he did not respond to questions after journalists sent him the material that would be reported.

The messages, filed publicly as exhibits in two separate Fulton County Superior Court cases, contained racist and antisemitic comments made between Millsap and his girlfriend at the time, who was also an investor in his real estate business. In those messages, the couple complained about how Black people smell and how Jewish people do business. In a subsequent hearing, Millsap chalked up some of his rhetoric about Jewish people to “locker room” talk, according to transcripts.

“Unfortunately, in the course of this litigation, comments which I never intended to share publicly have come to light, and people I care about and who have put their trust in me have been hurt. I want to extend my sincere apologies to my dear friends, colleagues and associates in both the black and Jewish communities for any and all pain my words have caused,” Millsap wrote on Sunday.

“My sincere hope is that the bonds and friendships that we have forged speak far louder than some flippant, careless remarks. I intend to work privately with all of you to use this as an opportunity to have a healthy and authentic dialogue about race and culture, in a productive, not destructive, manner.”

In emails to ProPublica and the AJC that were cited in the story published last week, Millsap’s ex-girlfriend apologized for the texts and wrote: “I severed all personal and professional ties with Mr. Millsap years ago because our values, ethics, and beliefs did not align. As a passive investor in Blackhall, I was not involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, nor have I been party to any of the lawsuits involving Blackhall. I consistently encouraged Mr. Millsap to treat his investors and community supporters with fairness and respect.”

Todd “Speech” Thomas, a Grammy-winning artist and the front man for Atlanta hip-hop group Arrested Development, issued a blistering statement on Wednesday criticizing Millsap and his comments. Thomas was a guest on Millsap’s podcast last year.

“While I previously had a positive experience interacting with Millsap, the gravity of his words cannot be ignored or excused,” Thomas said. “His recent ‘apology’ rings hollow without concrete actions to address the harm caused. Mere words are not enough; we demand meaningful steps toward education, understanding, and genuine change.”

Millsap, the former owner of Blackhall Studios, has been celebrated for his commitment to diversity in the workplace.

In 2019, as he planned to expand his movie studio, he courted a South DeKalb Black community in his effort to get the approval of county commissioners like Johnson for a land swap. Millsap had promised the community $3.8 million in improvements — including trails and a public park — as a perk for the swap. He sold the studio in 2021, and the 40 acres of land that he acquired a year earlier (and still owns) is now part of a fierce environmental dispute tied to an area that will house the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center — a $90 million police training facility that is under construction. (Critics call the project Cop City.)

Johnson, who was among the government officials who publicly supported the swap, said the proposal would not have gotten his vote had he known of Millsap’s messages.

Had Millsap’s texts been made public at the time he was pursuing the land swap, “he would have never gotten a chance to talk to me or anybody, with the community and myself — he would have been ran out of there,” Johnson said, adding. “It would have never gotten to this point. He talked about African Americans and our people, and you don’t do that.”

Johnson said Millsap presented an alternate public persona to the majority Black area as neighbors largely supported the land swap.

“We can’t go back in time on those things, but my goal is to use this as a learning opportunity to talk about how we have to combat that stuff,” Johnson said.

Millsap, in a written statement issued Wednesday, responded to Johnson’s comments and defended the land swap deal.

“I care about DeKalb County and its citizens and would hope Commissioner Johnson feels the same way,” he said. “The commissioners, including Commissioner Johnson, agreed at the time of the land swap that it was the best thing for the county, and they voted for it on that basis. That’s what good leaders should do, and that’s exactly what they did.”

DeKalb CEO Michael Thurmond, who is Black, said he was advised by the county attorney against speaking about the text messages because of pending litigation involving Millsap, his real estate company and the county.

One of those matters is a state Court of Appeals case in which environmentalists have sued Millsap and the county over the swap, claiming changes made by the Trust for Public Land and the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation to a deed agreement violated original terms that confirmed the land “shall be used in perpetuity as park property.”

It’s unclear what Millsap’s plans for the land are.

Millsap’s text messages have also caused a stir within the entertainment industry, where he allied himself with Black leaders and spoke publicly about the importance of the Black community’s contributions. Several people contacted by reporters said they didn’t want to speak publicly about such a discomforting subject.

Isaac Hayes III, founder of the Atlanta-based social media platform Fanbase and a record producer, was a guest on Millsap’s podcast in an episode posted in December 2022.

In an interview on Monday, Hayes said Millsap’s disparaging text messages were distasteful, but he’d be willing to talk with Millsap if he reached out.

“I wish him success in finding the pathway to, you know, dialogue — constructive dialogue — that results in those types of conversations for him in his life,” Hayes said. “I don’t speak about, you know, races of people in that fashion. It’s disappointing, but I wish him luck.”

by Sharon Lerner

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When you bite into a piece of celery, there’s a fair chance that it will be coated with a thin film of a toxic pesticide called acephate.

The bug killer — also used on tomatoes, cranberries, Brussels sprouts and other fruits and vegetables — belongs to a class of compounds linked to autism, hyperactivity and reduced scores on intelligence tests in children.

But rather than banning the pesticide, as the European Union did more than 20 years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed easing restrictions on acephate.

The federal agency’s assessment lays out a plan that would allow 10 times more acephate on food than is acceptable under the current limits. The proposal was based in large part on the results of a new battery of tests that are performed on disembodied cells rather than whole lab animals. After exposing groups of cells to the pesticide, the agency found “little to no evidence” that acephate and a chemical created when it breaks down in the body harm the developing brain, according to an August 2023 EPA document.

The EPA is moving ahead with the proposal despite multiple studies linking acephate to developmental problems in children and lab rats, and despite warnings from several scientific groups against using the new tests on cells to relax regulations, interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica show.

To create the new tests designed to measure the impact of chemicals on the growing brain, the EPA worked with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which comprises some of the world’s wealthiest democratic countries and conducts research on economic, social and scientific issues. The OECD has warned against using the tests to conclude a chemical does not interfere with the brain’s development.

A scientific advisory panel the EPA consulted found that, because of major limitations, the tests “may not be representative of many processes and mechanisms that could” harm the developing nervous system. California pesticide regulators have argued that the new tests are not yet reliable enough to discount results of the older animal tests. And the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, a second group of advisers handpicked by the EPA, also warned against using results of the nonanimal tests to dismiss concerns.

“It’s exactly what we recommended against,” Veena Singla, a member of the children’s committee who also teaches at Columbia University, said of the EPA’s acephate proposal. “Children’s development is exquisitely sensitive to toxicants. … It’s disappointing they’re not following the science.”

The EPA’s proposal, which could be finalized later this year, marks one of the first times the agency has recommended changing its legal safety threshold largely based on nonanimal tests designed to measure a chemical’s impact on the developing brain. And in March, the EPA released a draft assessment of another pesticide in the same class, malathion, that also proposes loosening restrictions based on similar tests.

The proposed relaxing of restrictions on both chemicals comes even as the Biden administration has been strengthening limits on several other environmental contaminants, including some closely related pesticides.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the EPA acknowledged that it “will need to continually build scientific confidence” in these new methods but said that the introduction of the nonanimal tests to predict the danger chemicals pose to the developing brain “has not been done in haste. Rather, a methodical, step-wise approach has been implemented over the course of more than a decade.”

The agency said its recent review of acephate included a thorough examination of a variety of scientific studies and that, even with its proposed changes, children and infants would still be protected.

The EPA expects to start accepting public comments on the acephate proposal in the coming months before it makes a final decision. The agency anticipates soliciting comments on malathion this summer.

Some environmental scientists strongly oppose loosening the restrictions on both acephate and malathion, arguing that the new tests are not reliable enough to capture all the hazards a chemical poses to the developing brain.

“It will put children at an increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and ADHD that we already know are linked to this class of chemicals,” said Rashmi Joglekar, a toxicologist at the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco.

Health and environmental scientists are concerned about more than the direct impact of having potentially greater amounts of acephate and malathion on celery and other produce. They also worry that using the new tests as a basis for allowing more pesticides on crops will set a dangerous precedent for other brain-harming chemicals.

“I think the companies see this as a new way over a 10- or 20-year period to gradually lobby” the EPA “to allow higher levels of pesticides in food,” said Charles Benbrook, an agricultural economist who has monitored pesticide regulation for decades. “If they can convince regulators to not pay attention to animal studies, they have a very good chance of raising the allowable exposure levels.”

Industry Helped Fashion EPA’s Testing Strategy

Since its founding in 1970, the EPA has relied on studies of mice, rats, guinea pigs and other species to set exposure limits for chemicals. The lab animals serve as a proxy for humans. Scientists expose them to different doses of substances and watch to see what levels cause cancer, reproductive problems, irritation to the skin and eyes, or other conditions. Some tests look specifically at chemicals’ effects on the offspring of rats exposed during pregnancy, and some of those tests focus on the development of their brains and nervous systems.

But over the past decade, chemical manufacturers and animal rights advocates have argued for phasing out the tests on the grounds they are impractical and inhumane. The animal experiments are also expensive, and the pesticide industry, which by law shoulders the cost of testing its products, is among the biggest proponents of the change.

The EPA has allowed the chemical industry and animal rights groups to help fashion its testing strategy. Agency officials have co-authored articles and held workshops on the use of the cell-based tests to regulate chemicals alongside representatives of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as well as Corteva Agriscience, BASF and Syngenta Crop Protection, companies that make pesticides regulated by the EPA.

The EPA said its scientists have been working to develop the nonanimal tests for decades with other government and scientific organizations, both nationally and internationally.

“It is absurd to describe those scientific efforts as an apparent conflict of interest,” the agency said in a statement.

The EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs has previously come under fire for its willingness to allow pesticides onto the market without required toxicity testing. In 2018, as The Intercept reported, staff members held a party to celebrate a milestone: The number of legally required tests the office had waived for pesticide companies had reached 1,000. A science adviser to the office at the time said the move spared companies more than $6 million in expenses.

While phasing out animal experiments would save money and animal lives, experiments involving collections of cells do not always accurately predict how entire organisms will respond to exposure to a toxic chemical. The new cell-based tests and computer techniques that are sometimes used with them can be reliable predictors of straightforward effects like eye or skin irritation. But they are not yet up to the task of modeling the complex, real-world learning disorders that have been linked to acephate and malathion, according to Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization.

(Photo illustration by Lauren Joseph/ProPublica. Source images by Getty and the Environmental Protection Agency)

The new tests can show whether a chemical can kill a brain cell. And they can show if a chemical affects how a brain cell connects with other brain cells, said Sass.

“But these tests can’t show that a kid is going to be able to sit through class and not go to the principal’s office,” she said.

While the cell-based tests may point to certain harms, they are likely to miss others, said Sass, who likens their use to fishing with a loose net. “You only know what you caught — the big stuff,” she said. “You don’t know about all the little stuff that got through.”

A 2023 study revealed the failure of the cell-based tests to detect certain problems. In it, scientists exposed brain cells to 28 chemicals known to interfere with the development of the nervous system. Although the tests were specifically designed to assess whether chemicals harm growing brains, they failed to clearly identify harm in one-third of the substances known to cause these very problems. Instead of registering as harmful, the test results on these established developmental neurotoxins were either borderline or negative.

Because of these potential blind spots and other uncertainties associated with the tests, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has advised against interpreting results of the nonanimal tests as evidence that a chemical doesn’t damage the brain. Several scientific groups have recommended that the EPA do the same.

A federal advisory panel of scientists assembled to advise the EPA on pesticide-related issues published a 2020 report that identified numerous limitations and gaps in the nonanimal studies, finding that they “underestimated the complexity of nervous system development.”

In 2021, the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, a group the EPA created to provide advice on how to best protect children from environmental threats, warned the agency that, “due to important limitations,” the test results “cannot be used to rule-out a specific hazard.”

In comments to the EPA, California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation also cautioned the agency against using the tests to conclude that a chemical doesn’t cause specific harms. The California regulators emphasized that the traditional battery of animal tests was still necessary to understand complex outcomes like the effects on children’s developing brains.

“To abandon it at this time would be to abandon a critical support for health-protective decisions,” they wrote.

EPA Accused of Double Standard

As much as 12 million pounds of acephate were used on soybeans, Brussels sprouts and other crops in 2019, according to the most recent estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey. The federal agency estimates that up to 30% of celery, 35% of lettuce and 20% of cauliflower and peppers were grown with acephate. Malathion is used on crops such as strawberries, blueberries and asparagus. (The U.S. Department of Agriculture prohibits the use of most synthetic pesticides, including acephate and malathion, to grow and process products certified by the agency as organic.)

Acephate and malathion belong to a class of chemicals called organophosphates, which U.S. farmers have used for decades because they efficiently kill aphids, fire ants and other pests. But what makes the pesticides good bug killers — their ability to interfere with signals sent between nerve cells — also makes them dangerous to people. For years, there has been a scientific consensus that children are particularly vulnerable to the harms of pesticides, a recognition that led the EPA to strengthen restrictions on them. But with both acephate and malathion, the agency is now proposing to remove that extra layer of protection.

The EPA effectively banned another organophosphate pesticide, chlorpyrifos, in 2021, based in part on evidence linking it to ADHD, autism and reduced IQ in children. (In response to a lawsuit brought by a company that sells the pesticide and several agricultural groups, a court vacated the ban in December, allowing the resumed use of chlorpyrifos on certain crops, including cherries, strawberries and wheat.) While some health and farmworker groups are petitioning the EPA to ban all organophosphate pesticides, the agency is arguing that it can adequately protect children by limiting the amount farmers can use.

Several studies suggest that, even at currently allowable levels, acephate may already be causing learning disabilities in children exposed to it while in the uterus or in their first years of life. In 2017, a team of University of California, Berkeley researchers, partly funded by the EPA, found that children of Californians who, while pregnant, lived within 1 kilometer of where the pesticide was applied had lower IQ scores and worse verbal comprehension on average than children of people who lived further away. Two years later, a group of UCLA scientists reported that mothers who lived near areas where acephate was used during their pregnancies had children who were at an increased risk of autism with an intellectual disability.

The EPA considered this research when deciding to relax the limits on acephate use but stated that flaws and inconsistencies made these epidemiological studies “not compelling.” The agency also dismissed a rat study submitted to the EPA in 2005 in which the pups of mother rats exposed to higher levels of acephate were, on average, less likely to move than the pups of mothers exposed to lower levels. The EPA told ProPublica that “no conclusions could be drawn” from the experiment, citing the “high variability of the data” it produced. But some scientists outside the agency find that study a particularly worrisome indication of the pesticide’s potential to harm children.

In its proposals to increase the allowable amount of both acephate and malathion on food, the EPA also had to look past other potentially concerning test results. Some of the cell-based tests of acephate showed borderline results for interference with brain functions, while some of the tests of malathion clearly indicated specific problems, including interference with the connections between nerve cells and the growth of certain parts of nerve cells. Several scientists interviewed by ProPublica said that such results demand further investigation.

Some scientists see a double standard in the agency accepting the imperfect nonanimal tests while citing flaws in other research as reasons to dismiss it.

“They’re acknowledging limitations in epidemiology while at the same time not acknowledging the even greater limitations of using a clump of cells in a petri dish to try to model what’s happening in a really complex organism,” said Nathan Donley, a scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy organization.

Asked about the criticism, an EPA spokesperson wrote in an email to ProPublica that the agency “does not believe there was a double standard applied.”

by Lizzie Presser

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Federal lawmakers introduced a legislative package on Tuesday that would expand heirs’ property owners’ access to disaster relief and provide assistance in clearing titles. Heirs’ property refers to land that has been passed down informally within families; without clear titles, owners can be ineligible for government aid and their land vulnerable to forced sales. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a Democrat from Texas, decided to introduce legislation after reading a ProPublica-New Yorker investigation on the legal and financial risks of holding land as heirs’ property.

More than a third of Black-owned land in the South is heirs’ property. The practice of conveying land without a will dates to Reconstruction, when many Black families did not have access to courts, and it continued through the Jim Crow era. The ProPublica-New Yorker story examined how heirs’ property owners can be locked out of federal assistance and compelled by courts to sell their land against their will.

The first of two bills, the HEIR Act of 2024, sponsored by Fletcher, along with Rep. Nikema Williams, a Democrat from Georgia, and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri, proposes amending Department of Housing and Urban Development regulations to ensure that heirs’ property owners without a clear title can use alternate documentation to qualify for disaster aid. The language echoes a policy adopted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2021, after a Washington Post analysis revealed a pattern of denying assistance to heirs’ property owners.

Fletcher noticed that HUD did not make similar changes. “When you look at the big picture data, it is really staggering to see the amount of lost generational wealth because of how this system operates,” she said. “The ProPublica article really brings to light what an incredible injustice this is and has been, and we need to be thinking creatively and holistically about how we can use the tools we do have to solve these problems.”

Nketiah Berko, an Equal Justice Works fellow, sponsored by the Rossotti Foundation, at the National Consumer Law Center, says that increasing heirs’ access to federal aid is critical. “When it comes to disasters, so many of the places that are most environmentally vulnerable are also areas that have histories of different types of property ownership — whether that’s uncleared title or communal homeownership,” he said. “It’s crucial that federal disaster relief programs recognize this and are tailored to the needs of these most vulnerable communities.”

A second bill, the HEIRS Act of 2024, sponsored by Williams and Rep. Byron Donalds, a Republican from Florida, along with Fletcher and Cleaver, proposes two programs to fund legal assistance for heirs’ property owners, who often cannot afford legal services to safeguard their ownership. The bill would authorize $300 million over 10 years for HUD to reward states that adopt or have adopted the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act; the law expands heirs’ rights when their ownership is challenged. These HUD grants could be used to help heirs’ property owners clear titles and cover associated fees. In addition, the bill would create a $10 million program for each of the next five years for HUD to fund eligible nonprofits that provide legal assistance to heirs’ property owners.

“This is really significant,” said Heather K. Way, director of the Housing Policy Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law. “More and more pro-bono legal programs have been popping up to help heirs’ property owners, but even if they have access to attorneys, there are fees and expenses associated with clearing title that can be a major impediment. This program would provide funding for those costs.”

Way also noted that HUD could make some of these proposed changes on its own by encouraging states to allow heirs’ property owners greater flexibility in qualifying for disaster aid, before federal legislation works its way through Congress.

In a statement, a HUD spokesperson wrote: “Strengthening the way HUD’s disaster recovery funds serve survivors is one of HUD’s highest legislative priorities.” The department made no comment on the specific bills.

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by Logan Jaffe

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

James and Barbara Johnson flip through a book of their memories. They arrive at a photograph Mr. Johnson snapped as a surprise: a photograph of the long-married couple’s first kiss.

Even after all this time, Barbara Johnson quietly says to herself, “I don’t know how he did that.”

“Me neither,” James Johnson says with a laugh.

James Johnson kept this selfie of his and Barbara’s first kiss. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO. Original photograph by James Johnson.)

The Johnsons are the center of a short documentary ProPublica released last year. The documentary, “Uprooted,” is part of an investigative project reported by Brandi Kellam and Louis Hansen, both of the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO, in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network and co-published by the Chronicle for Higher Education and Essence. The investigation examines a Black community’s decadeslong battle to hold on to its land as city officials wielded eminent domain to establish and expand Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia.

Now in his 80s, James Johnson has spent decades chronicling through photographs the life of a neighborhood that for the past several decades he’s watched disappear. The Johnsons live in one of five remaining homes of what was once a flourishing middle-class Black community, with roots that extend to the late 1800s. James Johnson’s grandfather, in 1907, purchased slightly more than 30 acres of land in what’s called the Shoe Lane area.

Mother and daughter Ellen Williams Francis and Mannie Francis Johnson (Courtesy of James Johnson)

Eventually, the Shoe Lane community expanded from mostly a community of farmers and laborers to a growing middle-class community including dentists, teachers and a NASA engineer in 1960. This was during a time when racial segregation was a legal pillar of American society, and all-white communities, including the then-all-white Christopher Newport University, enjoyed systematized benefits not afforded to Black people.

The Johnsons’ home as they were building it in 1964 (Courtesy of James Johnson) Johnson and his son during the home’s construction in September 1964 (Courtesy of James Johnson)

As Brandi reported, the 110-acre Shoe Lane area was adjacent to one of the city of Newport News’ most affluent white neighborhoods. So, when the Johnsons made it known they intended to subdivide more of their 30 acres to help provide Black families with opportunities for homeownership, the all-white City Council perceived it as a threat. Like many localities in midcentury America, the Newport News City Council had weaponized urban renewal against Black people to maintain racial segregation and the illusion of white superiority.

Brandi found that in 1961, the city used eminent domain to “seize the core of the Shoe Lane area, including the Johnsons’ farmland, for a new public two-year college — a branch of the Colleges of William and Mary system.” That college eventually became Christopher Newport University.

The Johnsons raised three children in their Shoe Lane home. (Courtesy of James Johnson)

At the time, the university and City Council all but ignored the community’s protests. Instead, the narrative conveyed by the white newspaper was that the Black people of Shoe Lane were against the university because they were anti-education.

For a story that for so long had been told wrong, Brandi saw an opportunity for her reporting to get the story right.

Watch “Uprooted: What a Black Community Lost When a Virginia University Grew”

As bulldozers and trucks filed into Shoe Lane over various waves of university expansion, James Johnson turned to his camera to preserve what he could. His photographs became evidence Brandi relied on in her reporting. While investigative reporters often use Freedom of Information Act requests and government data to document the past, Johnson’s personal archive told the story of what happened to Shoe Lane better than the official records.

268 Prince Drew Road, built in 1972 and demolished in September 2010 (Courtesy of James Johnson) 63 N. Moores Lane demolition in late January 2005 (Courtesy of James Johnson) After homes are demolished, trucks haul away the debris. (Courtesy of James Johnson)

“I just started knocking on doors,” Brandi told me of how her reporting began two years ago. “The person who opened the door for me was Mrs. Johnson.”

When Brandi eventually met James Johnson, she sat with him for hours. She said she let him teach her what happened; she absorbed the history like a sponge.

“He just started opening up these notebooks,” recalled Brandi. “I almost fainted.”

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He had kept the original deeds to the land his grandfather bought. He printed out parcel data that was no longer publicly available. He had photographed the front of dozens of homes that no longer existed, writing on sticky notes captions that could only hint at the emotional weight they carried to a community as it was systematically dismantled.

“He collected this not because he was looking for someone to tell the story,” said Brandi. “He did it because he was deeply hurt by what happened to his community.”

What Johnson’s archive documented was, in one light, a story of loss. But, said Brandi, his documenting was also an act of love.

A wedding in the Johnsons’ backyard (Courtesy of James Johnson)

His photographs of his own family and of the community depict lifetimes of what the people of Shoe Lane had earned and experienced for themselves. Today, the Johnsons’ home — the one they built with their own hands — is only one of five remaining. The university’s updated site plan calls for acquiring the last houses in the neighborhood by 2030, Brandi reported.

Barbara and James Johnson sit in their living room in July. They helped build the home on family property almost 60 years ago. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

But, for the first time, the university is publicly reckoning with the damage it’s caused to the Shoe Lane area. In January, the university announced its launch of a joint task force with the city of Newport News to reexamine decades of records regarding the neighborhood’s destruction. It may also recommend possible redress for those uprooted families. That reckoning is because of Brandi’s reporting and the accountability lens she’s brought to the story of Shoe Lane. But, Brandi said, her work is building on James Johnson’s project of making sure people don’t forget about Shoe Lane.

The investigation has also prompted attention from Virginia lawmakers, who’ve approved a commission to examine universities’ displacement of Black communities. That commission would consider compensation for dislodged property owners and their descendants.

The 25-minute documentary, which was directed by Brandi and produced by ProPublica’s Lisa Riordan Seville, recently won first place in the documentary journalism category of the Pictures of the Year International Competition. You can read the first installment of Brandi’s investigation, “How a Virginia College Expanded by Uprooting a Black Neighborhood,” and her essay on why the destruction of Shoe Lane matters to her.

by ProPublica

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Citing ProPublica’s reporting on barriers to mental health care access for veterans, the chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, Jon Tester, called on VA Secretary Denis McDonough to increase the number of providers in rural parts of the country.

Tester sent a letter to McDonough this month raising concerns about mental health staffing shortages nationwide. In it, he referenced ProPublica’s investigation into a VA clinic in Chico, California, that went five years without a full-time, on-site psychiatrist and failed to have same-day appointments for patients in crisis. Two veterans who struggled to get treatment there killed their mothers during acute mental health episodes in January 2022.

“While I understand the Chico (clinic) now has several full-time mental health care providers and offers same-day appointments, I am concerned this was not an isolated issue considering VA’s shortage of mental health care providers,” Tester wrote.

Tester asked McDonough how many VA clinics currently lack in-person mental health providers and how many are equipped to facilitate telehealth appointments. He also inquired about how the VA ensures same-day mental health visits are available at all facilities.

“I commend the Department for all of its efforts to decrease veterans’ barriers to mental health care and bolster suicide prevention efforts,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, VA must continue to lead the effort to increase the number of mental health providers and ensure those providers are in locations where veterans need them most.”

In a statement to ProPublica, VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes said the agency appreciated Tester’s letter and would respond directly.

Hayes noted the agency has several initiatives to increase capacity for mental health care, including an expansion of virtual services and a new team focused on growing the staffing pipeline. “One of our top priorities is to provide the world-class mental health care that Veterans deserve, whenever and wherever they need it,” he said.

ProPublica’s reporting grew out of an inquiry by the VA’s inspector general into one of the two Chico cases. The inspector general concluded the clinic had mismanaged that patient’s medications and failed to give her an appointment with a prescribing provider when she showed up at the clinic in crisis.

The patient, ProPublica learned, was a 27-year-old Navy veteran named Julia Larsen who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and was experiencing symptoms of psychosis. When Larsen couldn’t get an appointment that day, she went home with her parents and fired a handgun inside their home. One of the bullets she discharged struck her mother in the thigh, killing her.

ProPublica’s reporting revealed that a second veteran who had been receiving mental health treatment at the clinic also shot his mother that same week. Andrew Iles had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and believed his relatives were conspiring against him. The day after Larsen’s shooting, he called the Chico clinic to speak with a mental health doctor. Instead, he was put through to a pharmacist. He killed his mother the next afternoon. Both Larsen and Iles have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a state-run psychiatric hospital.

ProPublica found evidence of systemic staffing issues in the clinic’s mental health department. The VA had tried to plug the holes with telehealth providers, but several had quit or stopped seeing Chico patients. Employees begged regional leaders for more personnel and resources, they told ProPublica. One said she warned her colleagues, “We are going to kill someone.”

ProPublica also found failures in mental health care at VA clinics across the country. At least 16 veterans who received substandard care since 2019 killed either themselves or other people, a review of records revealed.

After ProPublica’s investigation was published in early January, McDonough traveled to Chico and promised to increase staffing in the clinic’s mental health unit. “We have a very fast-growing veteran population here in Chico,” he told a local reporter. “We have to make sure that we are growing commensurate with that population so that they can get the timely access to care and the timely access to benefits that they have earned.”

Tester’s letter raised continued concerns. He pointed to a December 2023 report from the VA that found the number of outpatient mental health encounters or treatment visits ballooned from 11.4 million in 2008 to 21.8 million in 2019 and that staffing shortages have persisted. Tester also noted in-person mental health services tend to be clustered at large VA medical centers in urban areas, while nearly a third of veterans enrolled in VA health care live in rural areas.

In rural regions, Tester wrote, “losing just one or two providers can have a massive impact on essential access to mental health care and once those providers are gone, it can take years to fill their vacancies and even longer to encourage those patients to return to care.”

Tester acknowledged the VA’s recent progress in improving access to mental health services. But he urged McDonough to press forward.

“More needs to be done,” he wrote, “specifically in rural areas, to keep pace with increased demand and prevent gaps in care that can have dire impacts on veterans and their families.”

by Mark Olalde, ProPublica, and Nick Bowlin, Capital & Main

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For the first time in more than 60 years, the Bureau of Land Management will force oil and gas companies to set aside more money to guarantee they plug old wells, preventing them from leaking oil, brine and toxic or climate-warming gasses.

The rule, finalized this month, comes at a critical time. Money previously set aside to clean up wells on federal land would have covered the cost of fewer than 1 out of 100, according to the government’s own estimates, and the vast majority of the country’s wells sit inactive or barely producing, meaning they’ll soon need to be plugged.

But the federal agency’s work falls short of protecting taxpayers from the oil industry’s cleanup costs, according to a ProPublica and Capital & Main review of contracts or other cost estimates at tens of thousands of wells across the country. While the updated rule will shrink the gap between companies’ financial guarantees to plug wells, known as bonds, and the cost of the work, it still leaves a significant shortfall.

One math error alone leaves taxpayers on the hook for roughly $400 million more than they should be. A Bureau of Land Management employee’s arithmetic mistake yielded an incorrect average cleanup cost for wells that the agency has plugged, largely at taxpayer expense. That artificially low cost estimate became the foundation of the new bonding requirements.

When ProPublica and Capital & Main pointed out the error in December, and that it could potentially cost taxpayers — and save oil companies — hundreds of millions of dollars when multiplied across the many thousands of wells the new rule would touch, the agency downplayed the miscalculation.

A spokesperson said the bureau “recognized the issues,” but they weren’t “significant enough” to correct. The proposed bond amounts are minimums, which “may be adjusted” through a review every five years. Staff can then demand companies set aside more money, the spokesperson said.

But over the most recent five-year period, oil companies ignored the Bureau of Land Management’s demands to increase their bonds more than 40% of the time, a ProPublica and Capital & Main review of agency data found. The final rule did not change how these reviews are carried out or enforced.

Evidence abounds of regulators’ past failures to hold the industry to account for cleanup: hundreds of thousands — potentially millions — of so-called orphan wells that companies have walked away from and left to the government to plug. Environmentalists, researchers and some politicians worry the window is closing to fix the problem while the industry is still profitable and there’s political momentum.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, along with environmental groups and taxpayer advocates, heralded the changes. “These reforms will help safeguard the health of our public lands and nearby communities for generations to come,” Haaland said. The Wilderness Society called the rule a “big step forward for the woefully outdated oil and gas program,” while the Sierra Club said it would help in “limiting harmful impacts to lands, wildlife and community health.”

Mark Squillace, a University of Colorado Law School professor who studies natural resources, agreed that the changes are an improvement over what was there before, “but it does not go far enough.” A ProPublica and Capital & Main investigation found that the country faces a shortfall well into the tens of billions of dollars between the cost to plug wells and the money available to do so. Unaddressed, those costs could be passed on to taxpayers.

“We have too many abandoned oil and gas wells that were not adequately bonded,” Squillace said.

Bad Math at the Bureau of Land Management

The Bureau of Land Management oversees an estimated 30% of the country’s mineral wealth, including oil and gas, but its oil bonding rules hadn’t been updated since they were written in 1951 and 1960, not even to account for inflation.

A 2019 Government Accountability Office report found that, as a result, bonds were insufficient to cover the cleanup costs of 99.5% of wells on federal land. (The bureau never fulfilled a public records request filed in May 2023 seeking updated details on bonds or a related request filed in September 2019.)

The Biden administration attempted to rectify bonding issues via the Inflation Reduction Act, but the Senate parliamentarian stripped reform provisions from the bill, saying they were not germane. The executive branch then launched a process to rewrite administrative rules that apply to the nearly 90,000 wells on federal public land, where cleanup costs vary widely depending on the depth and condition of the well, among other factors.

Republicans unsuccessfully attacked that process, with the House of Representatives in March passing a bill sponsored by Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert to stop the rule and bar the agency from ever completing similar regulatory updates. It was not passed by the Senate.

The Bureau of Land Management published its final rule this month. It increased from $10,000 to $150,000 the minimum bond required to cover a group of wells, called a lease, and from $25,000 to $500,000 the minimum to cover all of a company’s wells in a state. The rule also requires the amounts to be adjusted every decade to account for inflation.

Bureau of Land Management research found differing costs to plug and reclaim a typical orphan oil or gas well. The agency used the lower estimate in determining how much additional money to require companies set aside in bonds. (Bureau of Land Management)

The agency based the required bond amounts on the cost to plug a typical orphan well, which it estimated to be $71,000. It drew from a narrow sample — 22 wells the agency recently paid to plug in three states — contending that was “a sufficient representation of wells to support the rulemaking.”

But the agency acknowledged higher per-well cleanup costs elsewhere in its own research, stating that it expects to spend between $112,500 and $180,000 to plug each orphan well in the future. The agency did not explain why it appears to contradict itself.

Adding to skepticism over the agency’s calculations, three wells included in the agency’s sample cost only $500 each to plug.

That figure is “hard to imagine,” said Chris McCullough, an engineer who previously managed complex plugging projects for California. At one site McCullough helped plug, two wells were leaking gas into a densely populated neighborhood a mile from Dodger Stadium. His crew spent $1.2 million overall to seal the wells, move infrastructure and set up a shuttle service for residents while the job was in progress.

Meanwhile, Bureau of Land Management records show that a single well in Alaska, for example, recently cost the government more than $13 million to plug. This project, however, was not included in the agency’s calculation. (An agency spokesperson said the well was “not a useful comparison” because plugging wells in Alaska includes costs that would be unusual at orphan wells in the Lower 48.)

The agency’s decision to factor in low-cost outliers while eschewing the most expensive sites ignores the reality that plugging wells brings unexpected challenges, according to geologist Dan Dudak, who also oversaw cleanup work for California and now owns an environmental consulting firm alongside McCullough. Doing such work in Alaska, Dudak explained, requires setting up “small, mobile, self-contained towns” to support “the personnel and equipment necessary to plug a single well.”

In the Lower 48, plugging costs are also high. Across Indian Country, for example, it would cost an average of more than $82,000 to plug a typical well, not counting the millions of additional dollars needed to first find the wells and study what sort of cleanup is needed, according to Interior Department data published in 2023. The department also allocated $150 million to plug roughly 600 polluting or dangerous orphan wells elsewhere on federal land — $250,000 per well.

Even more wells are plugged by states’ oil agencies, which recently offered a glimpse into what experts consider realistic plugging costs in their applications for federal funds to support that work. Alaska, California, New Mexico, North Dakota and West Virginia regulators all told the Interior Department that it takes more than $150,000 to plug a typical orphan well and address pollution around it.

Energy finance think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative in April published a report analyzing the impact the federal agency’s new bonding levels would have in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. The study, authored by petroleum reservoir engineer Dwayne Purvis, found that, while the rule would require drillers to set aside millions of dollars in additional bonds, it would still only be enough to cover 3% of the projected cleanup cost.

“Despite the progress in the new rules,” Purvis said after reviewing the final version, “I’m convinced that the situation merits much more financial assurance in one form or another than this change provides.”

(Illustration by Peter Arkle, special to ProPublica) Cracks in the System’s Foundation

While the Bureau of Land Management’s updated rule focused on how much money should be set aside to clean up wells, it ignored another looming threat: cracks in the key financial tool oil companies use as bonds.

In public comments on the rule, both environmental groups and oil industry representatives asked it to address the shriveling market for surety policies, which are the most common type of oil cleanup bond and are similar to insurance policies in that a third party guarantees wells are plugged.

The bureau did nothing to mitigate that risk in the final rule. As evidence that bonds are secure, the agency instead pointed to a Small Business Administration program that helps small oil companies obtain surety bonds if they aren’t financially strong enough to purchase such policies from the market.

Meanwhile, many insurers are already declining to provide surety bonds to oil and gas companies or are requiring unobtainable levels of collateral as drillers become a riskier bet, surety brokers in three oil-producing states and state regulators in several others confirmed to ProPublica and Capital & Main.

Trevor Gilstrap, senior vice president of AssuredPartners, an insurance brokerage firm, called the surety market “so stinking bad right now.” Surety providers, he said, went from asking oil companies for as little as no collateral when underwriting a bond a decade ago to between 50% and 100% collateral now.

“Throughout my more than a decade in the insurance industry, with a strong focus on placing insurance and bond programs for oil and gas companies, I have never encountered a more challenging surety market,” he wrote in a letter commenting on oil bonds in New Mexico.

Insurance providers’ shrinking interest is all the more reason to require sufficient bonds now before oil companies walk away from their wells, researchers and activists say.

“Challenges in the oil and gas surety market should be taken as a giant flashing alarm for the financial health of the oil and gas industry itself,” said Andrew Forkes-Gudmundson, who works on bonding reform with environmental group Earthworks. The government must take this moment seriously, he added, otherwise “they and the taxpayers will be left holding the bag.”

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